The only way I can see switching my Luddite family off of the streaming sites is by making it easier. Up until now, I’ve torrented the old fashioned way, but now I’m moving into plex (ik, ik, jellyfin is better) and want to start using the -arrs. As I understand it, which I’m not sure I do, the -arrs will automatically grab torrents. In my mind, this would eat up a TB pretty quickly. Do you guys all have massive SSDs (heh), or am I misunderstanding?
Your question is a little odd, Torrenting “manually” and torrenting with the -arrs is the same in “process” and you will use the same amount of diskspace (not accounting for the programs themselves that is).
Using the -arrs is what make the who torrenting process a little more “automated” as you specify the content you are looking for, and once that content it available the software pulls it from whatever sites or index’s you have provided in your initial setup of the programs.
No more having to look at multiple sites for something, as soon as it’s online the arrr pull it and download it as soon as possible for you.
Massive SSDs? Nah, just a couple of 1TB drives as cache. The rest of my 120TB is spinning disks :)
Interesting. Are you pre-caching contents on the faster drives? How are you going about it?
I use Unraid as my server OS. It has a mechanism for caching file writes to the slower array disks.
Docker containers running the -arrs and Plex live on the SSDs so they load faster. Downloads are cached to SSDs so that read/write speed isn’t a limit when lots of downloads are running simultaneously. The downloads then get moved to a spinning disk array for long term storage whenever Unraid runs it’s ‘mover’ operation.
When data hoarding disk space is just a construct maaaaaan
As long as you set it up correctly ( unlike myself) and go through your media to make sure you don’t accidentally have duplicates (like I do) it shouldn’t take up much space. The actual -arrs themselves don’t use hardly any space.
I have a simple shell script that runs every night at 4am. It sets a size limit, then it deletes one episode at a time (starting with the oldest) until the directory size is under the limit. So a first in first out system. Scheduled it 3 years ago, and i just never run out of space ever.
A 2tb sata ssd goes for like 65 coins nowadays…pick AV1 & HEVC and you won’t be able to watch that amount in a year…so you can seed for a year too! :)
Just depends on what resolution and quality you decide to download. If you stick with 1080p H265, most movies are bout 1.5GB. If you want something better like 4K HDR, you’ll be looking at like 20-30GB per movie I think. I would advise the former, it’s easier on your hard drive and your home internet.
I ran mine off of a portable 2 TB HDD for a long time. Finally upgraded when I built a proper computer and put a 4 TB internal HDD in there.
I would prune the library every couple weeks as stuff got added. Tautulli (3rd party Plex monitor) provided info on what’s been watched and when, so I could delete stuff.
Now I have a 14 TB HDD with a dedicated computer for Plex. I have plans on upgrading everything to a proper RAID5 array with better processing.
I have a dedicated box with multiple raid5 spinners, I have had no complaints.
