Would I really be that cooked if I could technically afford to lose all of the data here? It all exists in other places. How likely is it that two drives will fail in the first place? I’ve never had a NAS before, so read/write operations will likely be under more strain, but I’ve had internal hard drives in every computer I’ve ever owned for more than 20 years, and I haven’t had one fail on me until long after the time that computer was the primary machine. The guides I’ve come across in my research all mention standard raid configurations, and I haven’t heard your alternatives come up before; is there a reason for that, like limited compatibility or something? Would it still be easy enough for me to follow a standard setup guide and swap the RAID 5 config for your recommendation if I was so inclined?

Thank you!

Why not?

So then if I’m evaluating a worst case for what I plan to use this NAS for, it would be that an attacker gains access to movies that I have on my shelf, CDs that I have on my shelf, books that I’d have the right to redownload as long as the place I bought them from is still in business, and my own save files for DRM-free video games that Heroic Games Launcher currently tells me not to rely on them for syncing back to GOG.com. At which point, if some attacker found a vulnerability and locked my NAS from me, they’d have caused me an annoyance in that I’d have to reformat those drives and re-rip that media. With no sensitive information intended to be on this thing, it seems pretty low risk, right?

If they’re self-hostable, they cease to be live services. And I’m just fine with that. I have no problem completely ignoring live services as a customer, but the problem I do have is how much research it takes to find out if a game I’m interested in is built to last or otherwise respects my values. Every Borderlands game has LAN multiplayer except for the GOTY edition of the first game, and even then, you can still acquire the regular edition of that game that still has it. Meanwhile, Hitman, a single player game, locks a lot of its best stuff behind an arbitrary server connection; the community has made pirate server executables to replace it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to reward IO Interactive with my dollars for that design decision.

why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years?

I ask people this every time they put time and money into a new live service game. I was referred to this community when I went down a self-hosted VPN rabbit hole for old LAN games whose multiplayer will never die.

He can hope a lot of things, but Stadia sure didn’t take.

I don’t even mind that there are so many different streaming services. It’s still a far better version of cable, where I can opt into ad-free for a few more dollars and sign up for or cancel a given service at will without having to have all of them. What sucks is when it’s the only legal distribution channel and I can’t make the choice that’s right for me based on my consumption, like buying just the movies and shows I want and playing them how I want. Demonstrated in the video, we still need what can most accurately be categorized as a workaround or a hack to even rip our own Blu Rays. All that plus the streaming services have raised their prices beyond the point where it’s an attractive deal.

Yeah, I’m aware. This is a problem that the movie and TV industry don’t appear to be interested in solving. And they seemingly operate as a massive cartel, so one studio isn’t about to break out on its own and innovate with a DRM free movie store.

My watch parties already basically dried up. The movie industry is crumbling in front of us for not being able to adapt to what their audience actually wants, and I end up just spending my time in other ways, because they’re offering me poor value and too much friction (VPNs and torrents) to get what I want, and that’s what my rant is. They’ll adapt or die. Right now, it’s looking like the movie industry will die. You’re making a lot of assumptions there about offloading my decision making to AI though…

Oh, I forgot the other part of my rant when it comes to acquiring the content. Brick and mortar doesn’t carry Blu Rays anymore. Maybe Walmart does, but I don’t have one near me. Target and Best Buy stopped. I have a functional mall near me, but not one store in it sells movies, and when I asked, they looked at me like I had two heads.

I’m all for this, but acquiring the media outside of streaming services in the first place is difficult, likely by design. There’s no GOG for movies and TV; there’s not even a Steam. My wife is basically permanently subscribed to Peacock because she loves Law and Order: SVU, to the point that she basically has the whole series on loop while she knits. I started looking this time last year into how to self-host all that, but I didn’t even get to the point of finding out what Jellyfin is before I realized that it was impossible to legally acquire all the seasons on Blu Ray or even DVD. They want me to either subscribe to Peacock or buy a “digital copy”, which is just rental streaming by another name. I’m not a skilled enough pirate to know that my ISP isn’t going to mind my activity, and being a skilled pirate isn’t even something I’m interested in being. Plus, my past experiences with piracy is that beggars can’t be choosers, and the bit rate could be awful, or it would have huge watermarks from whatever Canadian channel the pirate recorded from, and that’s not a great experience when it’s supposed to be a gift anyway.

Unlike the video author, I’m not even bothered by algorithmic recommendations for media. I actually like it. The main reason I want to self host my media is because I don’t watch so much of it that a subscription price makes sense very often. If my wife and I are just watching the same couple of things over and over again, why do I need a buffet of content I’m not going to watch at monthly subscription prices?