Drive Expansion - Internal/External - SAS? SATA? Recommendations

Quote from njizm

Looking for input on how to expand 4-more drives? I'm currently full...

Honestly, when I reach that number of hard drives I consider the option of replacing some hard drives with others of greater capacity and relegating the current ones to a secondary server box for backups. That option always wins out in my case for many reasons.

Another measure I take is to re-encode all the movies to h265. It may seem silly but that means they take up half the space with the same final viewing quality. The result is half as many hard drives.

Quote from gderf

Is that re-encode automated, and if so can you share the script?

I use handbrake. You can use it on the server itself in a container. This one works fine. https://hub.docker.com/r/jlesage/handbrake

But the server must have certain characteristics so that this process is not too slow. You can do hardware re-encoding if there is a compatible GPU. Or you can use the CPU directly, in that case the number of cores is the determining factor. If you encode with hardware it is faster but the final size is generally somewhat larger than if you encode with software.

Another option is to do it on your PC and then move it to the server. If the server's CPU/GPU is not very suitable, it may be the best option.

Handbrake can be configured so that when a file arrives in a folder it is automatically re-encoded if that is what you are looking for.

Well, I guess if you have a whole library to re-encode, some system like that might be interesting. In my case I don't need all that, I do it more manually, I've been doing it for many years and most of my library is already in hevc.

If you've never done this you'll need to do some testing first to get to a result you're comfortable with. Depending on various factors, such as compression ratios, etc., that you must configure, the result may not be to your liking or it may be what you are looking for.

I re-encoded hundreds of my videos. Using handbrakecli, the re-encoding was 10-20x faster with an nvidia 2060rtx than just the ryzen 5800x in the same system. example script similar to what i used - https://github.com/ryecoaaron/scripts/blob/main/convert.sh

Quote from Zafkiel

I think hardware encoding is faster, but the image quality is not as good as software encoding.

I think the same.

Quote from Zafkiel

I think hardware encoding is faster, but the image quality is not as good as software encoding.

If the bit rate of cpu encoding is the same as gpu encoding, the cpu will be slightly better. That is why you just use a bit higher bit rate when gpu encoding. I bet people couldn't tell the difference between my nvenc 5000 bit encoded videos and cpu encoded 5000 bit encoded videos.