I’ll just leave this here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-not-at-all-sad-history-of-89890804/

R7 gang here. Let us keep the dream alive!

Curious what was the model of your drive failure? I have 6 years now on a bunch of 8TB WD Elements/EasyStore drives as well as some 10TB-14TB WD MyBook, Elements, and refurbished WD drives from serverpartdeals in the preceding years. Still no failures yet but I’m expecting one eventually.

I’m currently running mine on Windows and use SnapRAID and DrivePool as my defense against drive failures. I think I have 7 data drives and 2 parity at this point (totalling around 90TB). Beyond that I copy the Snapraid whatchamacallit to a separate backup drive along with my OS drive. This isn’t really a ‘backup’ but in the scenario where I have several failures and no way to restore, I still have radarr/sonarr keeping track of my library and a membership to several private trackers.

I wouldn’t worry too much about losing media files as most can just be downloaded again. I find it more beneficial to make use of all the storage space you can rather than trying to do a 1:1 backup, which gets pretty absurd once you start getting up there in movie/TV count.

Or they funnel it all to GallowBoob or whoever his replacement is.

No reason to apologize! It made the image more eye-catching!

The photo orientation makes it look like you’re pulling the cat out of your car’s HVAC system.

You can still use one of these with the NAS as storage. A Synology doesn’t have a lot of horsepower to run programs directly on their hardware so if you plan on doing something like a media server you might encounter some issues. An optiplex (or any other PC) running Proxmox will let you run a bunch of different containers or VMs separately

You might look for a used Optiplex SFF or micro form factor PC. These can be purchased for around $100 in the US and have full fledged PC hardware which is capable of running most things. The downside here is less peripheral support for things like PCIE or internal storage.

Look into radarr and sonarr to handle all the media acquisition.

Provided it’s available in your location, and still being sold/produced. Furthermore Blurays are only going to be harder to find as time goes on with companies like Best Buy stating that they’ll no longer be selling them.

DNS is like a big phone book telling you that navigating to “google.com” = IP address 75.209.123.456, for example. Your ISP can see these requests and add information to them like ads. Using AdGuard DNS encrypts these requests so they can’t be modified.

I have a bunch of WD HDDs (9) in my Fractal Design Define R7 case sitting on top of my desk, about 2ft away at ear level, and can barely hear them. If anything the hum of the fans is what I can hear most (though still quiet). I have a security camera NVR with a little 40mm fan 12ft away on top of a high shelf in my office and I can hear it over my server by quite a large margin.

Even if rebuilding it today, I’d go for HDDs as you can’t buy 12, 14, 18TB, etc SSDs for a couple hundred bucks and you won’t really gain any benefit using SSD over HDD as reading large movie files from a disk isn’t going to saturate the drive cache and you won’t be dealing with random seeking.

You said you might upgrade all the drives in the future but how (2nd NAS?) and what will you do with the old ones? 4x4TB is going to fill up pretty fast especially when you’re first starting out and eager to add new titles.

Funnily enough, his hairline resembles many of the product seals I’ve unsuccessfully tried to remove.

The Dell Optiplex micro form factor might be a good option. You can get them cheap on the second hand market (at least here in the US).

I bet it’s rooted in some BS justification like screen capturing/ copyright infringement.

This is mostly unnecessary. I just slap the wall mount up into the studs, hang the TV, and use a $7 cable concealer to hide the power cord. Dedicated outlets for power and video behind the TV is great but that’s more suited for rich people or electricians.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Legrand-0-5-in-White-Straight-Channel-Cord-Cover/3129213

I just use these to hide any cables and it makes them nearly invisible.

It would be nice if they included mounts, but the VESA mounting system is standardized and there are lots of different styles of mounts to fit your needs.

How is it annoying? I try to wall mount every TV because then I can move it around or angle it easily and it looks 100x better than hanging halfway off a bedside table.

This is like a $150 TV. They aren’t going to make a $50 solid steel base and internal frame for that over some cheap injection molded legs.