Lament for the hard drive

I currently rip all of the blurays I buy and encode them into h.264 (the quality is good enough, the size is much smaller and I still have the originals if I want to change that some time in the future) and dump them onto a bunch of drives I have in my main rig or onto a NAS box. I then run plex on my main rig and use it to stream to whatever devices I want or to the TV hooked up to my main rig.

I donā€™t think 4k isnā€™t something consumers donā€™t want exactly, but it is self limiting until the price to size ratio becomes realistic. For a lot of home setups going beyond 1080p isnā€™t going to yield much of an improvement in picture quality because of the distance people sit from the screen. I think a bigger market would be something akin to an Oculus Rift setup (assuming technology to price gets there) where you could exploit +4k video much more easily.

Of course you also have to look at the flip side to video. Resolution ups your size but there are new compression formats like X.265 that help drive it to more manageable levels. Iā€™m all for the idea of lossless, but I also think there is a point where itā€™s good enough.

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I used to have a Conner 120 MB drive that worked up until 2001 or soā€¦it died when I dropped a keyboard on it while running. It was a sad day indeed.

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Well, I meant losslesly from the source discs. Blu-ray obviously has lossy h.264 video and (generally) lossless audio. Most of them are 1080p24 (some European TV is 1080i50 - really 2:2 pulldown 25fps like PAL), I actually donā€™t think I own any in 60fps BDs.

If I were to rip and store them Iā€™d have them all as either ISOs or some sort of MKVs, but Iā€™d really rather have a few grandsā€™ worth more movies or a projector than have them all on a big server. Currently theyā€™re all in massive disc-wallets with the artwork in shoeboxes. The plastic cases go to recycling.

I do have all my CDs ripped to FLAC and on a server (3TB, mirrored), which is lovely, but you generallly arenā€™t making mixes and so on of movies. You just plop them on and watch them for a few hours between disc-changesā€¦

One day Iā€™ll have a movie server, but thereā€™s just no point for me currently.

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All the new 4K discs are really upscaled from sub-4K DIs. 4K is lovely in terms of getting rid of the old chickenwire effect on projectors, but you could always just soften the focus a little.

If I were to transcode, itā€™d be to h.265. I think it takes about half the space of h.264 for the same quality, but I donā€™t know how many non-PC devices are capable of playing it back yet.

Thatā€™s the beauty of plex, it transcodes on the fly for you so it can play on any device.

Does the transcoding produce artefacts? Iā€™m awfully snotty about getting 100% of the format quality I pay for.
: )

First off, $14K is a typo, should be $1.4K. That seems obvious.

If by ā€œ8TBā€ you mean ā€œ6TBā€, and I cannot find any higher capacities ā€œwidely availableā€ at all. 8TB drives are about $400, but 10TB is brand new - thereā€™s only HGST helium 10TB 3.5" HDDs as far as I can find online or off.

SSDs go higher, but the article is clearly about HDDsā€¦

Nowadays a few hundred bucks worth of hard drive is enough to keep almost anyone other than a digital filmmaker going indefinitely, or at least until the rest of their hardware goes obsolete.

You clearly underestimate the capacity of guys to collect porn. :grin:

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Hard drive capacity needs will vary greatly depending on whether the video in question is standard definition, HD, or H double-D.

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Is it foolishness to believe that individuality is necessary? Or that to remain an individual, some essential gap between us all must remain.

What the singularists describe is a personality wiping disease.

There is such a thing as too much information flowing between people.

Why? We can be the Borg.
No more loneliness.

ā€¦I never really understood why the Borg are shown as the bad guysā€¦ A bit of pain at the assimilation, and then you finally belong somewhereā€¦

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Or we could, you knowā€¦develop better culture and social structure; the added benefit there is of course, none of that inevitable loss of function/purpose/understanding that comes with alteration of the mindā€™s engram, as seen with anti-pstychotic medication, ECT and injury.

I know, I knowā€¦itā€™s not quite the same thing.

But you will be gone, and me too after this ā€œSingularityā€ and what for?
So some other, smarter thing made up of human bits can paint meaning upon the universe alone?

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8TB Seagate drives are currently Ā£149 ex tax in the UK which works out at about $210 ex tax in the US.
These are archival drives rated for 180TB/year, meaning that once the data is written it can be read about once every couple of weeks. Standby mode is less than a watt, operating mode is 7.5W, so in the scenario I mentioned above with 5 drives and a cache drive, average operating power of the whole array would be around 12W.
Another way to look at this is to say that if the runtime of around 20GB of content was an hour, one of these drives could supply 9000 hours of content per year - which equates to 24/7/365.25 operation.
Itā€™s quite obvious from this why, for home use, rotating oxide is still the most economical approach for media.

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I donā€™t think it is a realistic proposal.

True. I doubt thereā€™d be a social structure thatā€™d take me.

We will be gone after some time anyway, and what for?

Could be also a shot for our effective immortality.

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Immortality through loss of humanity? And donā€™t get me wrong, I donā€™t like people.
What youā€™re describing is immortality through technology.

What the singularity promises is immortality of the type artists and maniacs enjoy.
That is to say, your bits will be calculating pi until they burn out because the gestalt robot wants to draw really pretty sunflowers that day.

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Came for hard drive discussion, stopped by for teleology and eschatology.

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I would have a word with the designer of that system that transfers information about arriving photons to the brain. It has rather more design gotchas than Windows Vista. What genius decided to have a hole in the middle of the optical sensor to route the signal cables, and then decided to use fill-in data to compensate? Or had four types of photosensor two of which are rather close in peak wavelength? Or who started off with red-green-blue encoding and then decided half way to switch to blue/-yellow and red/-green channels? Or who decided to have each half of each sensor go to a different side of the brain and then have to have a big pipe to join up the signals?

Oh, apparently there wasnā€™t a designer as such. Iā€™ve seen code like that beforeā€¦

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Humanity is overrated. Too often it is a lead ball on oneā€™s leg, when one tries to swim.

Yes. Why not? Got any other way? :stuck_out_tongue:

Doesnā€™t sound bad.

Still better than what the society keeps giving me now.

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