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I think we need to segregate data hoarders from people who want maybe 100-200 movies. At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space. Back in the day, I routinely watched movies compressed to fit on a CD at 700mb. Sure, that is now laughable quality, but most people don’t care about 8k with Dolby digital at 100+Gb per film.

A single 20TB drive can hold quite a bit of media.

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> At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space.

Not quite. Before the insane prices I was able to get 4x 20TB for $1,200, so $300/20TB, so $8000/300 = 26.6, call it 27 drives, so 27x20 = 540TB, a little over half a petabyte, not "petabytes" (before mirror/raid/etc).

If you were buying that over time and keeping your price-per-harddrive about the same, you'd come up with much lower (since you would have been buying smaller drives in the past. Also smaller/older drives have to be rotated out due to age/wear/too-small so it's not all additive.

But you are correct, there is a difference between "data hoarders" and people that pirate and it's an important distinction (eww, that sounds a little AI-y, but I wrote it).

I knew I should have calculated it before running my mouth. Still, a single drive is a sufficient media library for most people.

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