When I began building my server rig - which includes my torrenting setup - last year, I was able to find the 4TB 2.5 inch SATA SSD Samsung 870 EVO for about €300. I bought four of them, but now, I’m running out of space, so I checked a couple of retailers. Wowee. What is going on with these prices. 😂 Even Micron’s Crucial brand, which at some point was the more affordable option, is way past it’s curfew. 🤬
I just wanted to vent.
Since I’m one of those people who’d rather sleep in an anechoic chamber or at the very least use white noise or the likes in order to sleep, running HDDs doing random reads and writes next to my bed in my single room apartment is not a option.
I routinely reduce size 50%-70% and play it on a 65" 4k TV and you can’t tell the difference.
Sometimes I can actually improve the original video by applying noise reduction.
As for power - it really depends on your hardware and what you’re trying to do. Since I use an Intel SFF desktop, I have the option of using QSV for conversion and my rig peaks at 80 watts. Not that my peak matters because QSV is very power efficient and fast - takes perhaps 20 min to convert a 6GB video to 1-2 GB.
Using AMD VCE, I’ve been able to do the same with a remux, taking it from 33GB down to 5GB. My first attempt on that one got the file size all the way down to 3GB but there was some rough artifacting on the studio logos at the start and intro credits. I decided the extra 2GB was worth it for that minor bump. Bizarrely, the rest of the film seemed fine but I could have missed something since I didn’t bother with a full watch.