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Comment by colinmhayes | Hacker News Reader

Well it's costing this guy $45 a month apparently.

$45 a month is a pretty cheap vice as far as things go, though.

You could easily be spending $45 a month just on streaming services.

Or he could spend $10 on the tracker, $10 to run a normal computer without 30 drives, and still watch all the same stuff for half the price.

Maybe there are better usenet services that don't get holes punched in their collections as much, but generally on usenet you get missing episodes over time.

My interpretation of your original post was that you were saying spending $45 a month on this project illustrated that he has a problem.

Is that accurate?

How does the fact that he could be saving money support that?

My interpretation of OPs post is that they felt they had a problem. I assumed that problem was the amount of money/time spent installing and upkeeping those drives.

I have a much longer list of content that I want to watch on streaming services - and never care about rewatching - that I don’t even bother with pirating anymore.

As far as $45. I spend less than that on streaming services.

- Netflix $7 (T-mobile discount)

- HBO Max - Free - bundled with AT&T fiber

- Amazon Prime Video - I would have Amazon Prime anyway. But let’s attribute $6.00/month to it.

- AppleTV+ - it’s part of a bundle. But let’s attribute $5/month to it.

- Disney/Hulu no ads bundle - $14

- Paramount Plus - $10/month - no ads

Besides, I travel a lot and it’s much more convenient to use streaming (unlimited data) than trying to maintain hardware. My Plex server has been down for a year.

Admittedly- my wife and I do have the AMC Stubs+ movie pass ($50) because we actually enjoy going to the movies as part of date night.

So you have different preferences than OP. OP mUst HAvE a Pr0Blem!!1!

According to the numbers you just posted, you are spending 42 a month on streaming services which, while it is strictly less than 45, I wouldn't say it's meaningfully less than 45.

What point are you trying to make?

> Besides, I travel a lot and it’s much more convenient to use streaming (unlimited data) than trying to maintain hardware. My Plex server has been down for a year.

That server does a lot of other stuff. Controls zigbee devices, runs a small intranet search, handles internet archiving workloads...

The hard drives are the main power cost though.

How many drives do you have in your server? Or do you just have very high power costs? I thought drives consume ~7-9w unless they're very high RPM. Maybe consider upgrading to a few high density drives? Hard drive costs have corrected recently after the Chia craze last year.

My estimate is that it's idling at ~250w. I'm admittedly fudging the details a bit, right now archive-team-warrior is using a lot of CPU because it's archiving telegram, and that's pushing the number up.

Calculating it again the actual number is a bit lower than that, and it wasn't in US dollars.

With a Kill A Watt (or similar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_A_Watt) meter, you don't have to estimate power usage, you can measure the actual power usage.

I've got one, but it's being used for other stuff.

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