I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.

I admit, I didn’t, but I thought the movie was so horrible that I couldn’t imagine how the game could possibly be better. Glad to hear they redeemed it a bit.

It’s the Walmart of torrents, and it’s got more LEO than a New York Dunkin Donuts.

That may be true, but I have had nothing but reliability from mine. Hell, there was one with a broken plastic SATA pin support and bent pins, and that thing still worked and tested fine for 3 more years.

As with all things, results may vary, but if you have a decent backup of your most important files, they are still the best bang for your buck to get a huge amount of storage, imo.

Moving your files back and forth should be no problem, especially if you have a decent router. Local networks are freaky fast these days, and are often only limited by the read/write speed of your disk.

I basically seed forever, and I also upload and fill requests sometimes. I have dozens of terabytes seeding. I see it as my contribution to the preservation of the art, and if I’m going to take up the storage space with it I might as well be seeding it too.

The real question is why would anyone want to play Riddick.

Lol.

Out of curiosity, does it not feel weird to pay $1 for an album that someone else clearly pirated? Cut out the middle man and plunder that booty yourself for free! Or pay more money and actually contribute to the artist.

Your current plan is giving your hard earned dollar to organized criminals for nothing more than the illusion of a legal purchase. What they are doing (selling pirated content for profit) is literally more illegal than piracy itself.

It’s so easy that you’ll never go back. There are options depending on what you want to do too. I primarily store entertainment media, so I ran a simple Ubuntu Server for years with cockpit installed so I could easily mount and manage drives and PLEX to serve the media. It got me hooked, and worked flawlessly.

I have since become more ambitious and run ProxMox with an Open Media Vault VM to serve the media through NFS to other VM’s. My experience with Open Media Vault has been that it is a bit more complicated than my previous setup, but has resulted in a lot more flexibility with how I can access the data from multiple computers.

I will warn you though that the collecting can get addicting. It’s always easy to justify adding just one more drive to the system, and they get cheaper and bigger every year.

Dude, all those cloud services are tough to get data out of. That’s why a lot of them charge an arm and a leg to have it mailed to you on physical media.

If those disks are the big plastic WD externals, they can be easily shucked and used in a NAS—much cheaper than buying the bare drives without the casing for reasons known only to WD. I have 80+ TB across 5 shucked drives, and the oldest has worked perfectly for over 6 years of heavy 24/7 use.

Where do you think that dirt cheap music site is getting their tracks from? I would tell you, but the name is REDACTED.

I get all that, and I wasn’t trying to suggest HDMI cords are useless. I just got the feeling that there was a cleaner way to accomplish what OP was trying to do since there were scant details about the end result in the post.

I ran a computer directly to the television for years before switching to PLEX and an Apple TV, hence the suggestion—the user experience increased so significantly that I would never go back.

What are you trying to display on the TV? I feel like most media can be handled better with something like PLEX rather than directly displaying it with an HDMI cord. Much easier to browse with a remote anyway.

I choose the month to month option because I actually want to support the company. Their product is one of the most useful things in my home, and the extra features you get with premium are definitely worth the $4 per month to me.

Besides, it’s still massively cheaper than Netflix.

Yes.

It feels like you answered your own question—a second server comes with advantages and sounds like it isn’t a significant increase in price.

Not in any noticeable way. I have a gigabit connection and the server runs over ethernet so it doesn’t clog up the wifi. There is no noticeable difference when I run a speed test on another device with the server turned on vs. turned off. I’ve never gotten an ISP letter either, so it seems I’m doing something right.

Yes and no. I keep a seedbox for convenience, but the vast majority of them are hosted on a home server.

3000 torrents and counting.

The private tracker Illuminati are high and mighty. We’re basically internet aristocracy. /s

If you never stop seeding, you never have to worry about it.

I’ve honestly had the best performance just leaving connections and max active at unlimited. I’ve read a lot of suggestions about limiting it for increased upload speed, but I have never seen the benefit when I’ve tried it.

I’m just partial to AMD, and honestly the Ryzen 9 has absolutely blown my mind. That thing chews through 4k like nothing and barely breaks 100 degrees.

I seed several thousand torrents that compose over 50 TB of content, and qBittorrent barely uses 1-2 gigs of RAM. It uses that little even though I set the max usage to 5gb. As far as the processor goes, that barely gets touched unless I’m doing maintenance and need to recheck the files, in which case my CPU usage hovers around 5% or less. Honestly, the thing that gets the most action from qBittorrent is simply the hard disk. I found the recheck goes faster if I set it to just one at a time so that the disk doesn’t bottleneck—the CPU and RAM will already be more than enough, even on a mid tier machine.

Now Plex on the other hand, that bad boy can max out a CPU like nobody’s business if the settings are right, but since upgrading to a Ryzen 9, even “make my CPU hurt” won’t take it above 80%.

So basically, the torrenting is pretty low footprint, but serving torrented content for streaming, especially when transcoding is involved, can be much more resource intensive.

Use a cheap seedbox. SFTP for transfer. Some seed boxes are under $5 per month, so the time and hassle you’ll save will be cheap and worth it if you’re sure you want to go with a torrent instead of direct download.