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Data hoarders. I'm in a plex group on fb and there's people there with libraries that they could never personally watch all of. It sometimes seems like it's m

Data hoarders. I'm in a plex group on fb and there's people there with libraries that they could never personally watch all of. It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection.

stingraycharles 8mo ago
This is correct, I personally aim to have all the highest quality versions of all movies, ie original Blu-ray. I have plenty of people that make use of it, it’s a hobby.
hrimfaxi 8mo ago
Either that or they share their library with others (or maybe a bit of both)
tuananh 8mo ago
how much does it cost in term of electricity per month?
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  From "negligible" to "I have another house inside my house" levels, depending on your hardware. A close friend of mine runs a single beefy server at home, which is currently ~35% of his monthly bill if I'm not making mental-math mistakes.
  - overfeed 8mo ago
    As far as serious hobbies go, 35% of monthly electric bill is not breaking the bank. How much do people with other hobbies spend monthly on parts for their project cars, race entry fees, gym fees, "high performance" gear, Track fees, etc?
    - bayindirh 8mo ago
      I didn't imply that it's a high amount. It's just an example I can refer reliably. I'm not a stranger to expensive hobbies. I have at least a couple of them. Photography and high end stationery being two of them.
- PeterStuer 8mo ago
  If you run all the drives 24/7 I would guess you are looking at somewhere around 400W assuming a power sipping minipc as the host. This can be extremely optimized if you intelligently spin down disks when idle, probably down to >50W average. Cost will depend on your electricity contract, but will propbably not be a thing that would stop you if you want to do this.
bayindirh 8mo ago
Another part of it is the ability to play with enterprise hardware. That level of hardware has so many features which is cool for the technically inclined, but useless for a normal home user. When enthusiasm hits resources and the desire to acquire knowledge, this happens sometimes. I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked. Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually. I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool). Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
  Fwiw you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7, or have a huge hdd capacity (vs say $n enterprise drives of very limited capacity). It’s still gonna be expensive, but not silly expensive (and the ROI when you get promoted probably makes it worth it)
  - bayindirh 8mo ago
    In the post I have seen, where the guys got a single full rack and played with it on the weekends, running it for a day added a significant amount to their bills, so yes, newer systems are more efficient (generally due to compute efficiencies), but disks are disks. Spindles are not way more efficient than before. On the ROI part, this is a case by case issue. I for one can do the "play" part at work, too. Also, I don't want to spare space for a 1U or 2U full-depth server at home. I'm not even adding disk boxes to this. I neither have the space, nor the desire.
dghughes 8mo ago
You hear of media companies that delete old music and video from their own archives. People saving what they can may have the only copy left in existence.
overfeed 8mo ago
> It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection. Aren't all collecting hobbies like this? Stamps, music on vinyl, movie posters, retro computers, cars, etc all have very little additional utility for size > n.

stingraycharles 8mo ago

This is correct, I personally aim to have all the highest quality versions of all movies, ie original Blu-ray. I have plenty of people that make use of it, it’s a hobby.

hrimfaxi 8mo ago

Either that or they share their library with others (or maybe a bit of both)

tuananh 8mo ago

how much does it cost in term of electricity per month?

bayindirh 8mo ago
From "negligible" to "I have another house inside my house" levels, depending on your hardware. A close friend of mine runs a single beefy server at home, which is currently ~35% of his monthly bill if I'm not making mental-math mistakes.
- overfeed 8mo ago
  As far as serious hobbies go, 35% of monthly electric bill is not breaking the bank. How much do people with other hobbies spend monthly on parts for their project cars, race entry fees, gym fees, "high performance" gear, Track fees, etc?
  - bayindirh 8mo ago
    I didn't imply that it's a high amount. It's just an example I can refer reliably. I'm not a stranger to expensive hobbies. I have at least a couple of them. Photography and high end stationery being two of them.
PeterStuer 8mo ago
If you run all the drives 24/7 I would guess you are looking at somewhere around 400W assuming a power sipping minipc as the host. This can be extremely optimized if you intelligently spin down disks when idle, probably down to >50W average. Cost will depend on your electricity contract, but will propbably not be a thing that would stop you if you want to do this.

bayindirh 8mo ago

Another part of it is the ability to play with enterprise hardware. That level of hardware has so many features which is cool for the technically inclined, but useless for a normal home user. When enthusiasm hits resources and the desire to acquire knowledge, this happens sometimes. I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked. Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually. I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool). Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).

hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
Fwiw you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7, or have a huge hdd capacity (vs say $n enterprise drives of very limited capacity). It’s still gonna be expensive, but not silly expensive (and the ROI when you get promoted probably makes it worth it)
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  In the post I have seen, where the guys got a single full rack and played with it on the weekends, running it for a day added a significant amount to their bills, so yes, newer systems are more efficient (generally due to compute efficiencies), but disks are disks. Spindles are not way more efficient than before. On the ROI part, this is a case by case issue. I for one can do the "play" part at work, too. Also, I don't want to spare space for a 1U or 2U full-depth server at home. I'm not even adding disk boxes to this. I neither have the space, nor the desire.

dghughes 8mo ago

You hear of media companies that delete old music and video from their own archives. People saving what they can may have the only copy left in existence.

overfeed 8mo ago

> It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection. Aren't all collecting hobbies like this? Stamps, music on vinyl, movie posters, retro computers, cars, etc all have very little additional utility for size > n.