Maybe if i was still single and had a disposable income. The price of that 8tb hard drive you listed is almost half the cost of my entire rig. I will also guarantee you will see buffering if you seek to the half way point of a movie right after starting it. It would be impossible not to unless your server can instantly shove the entire movie down the pipe at startup.
Also, why do you think my drive is 150gb?
im impressed you have a setup working for less than $200.
Second question, you said
There is more bang for your buck for larger files for sure, but even on smaller files there is a noticable difference between h264 and hevc my library is only 9% done and it has shrunk from 153gb to 147gb.
I’m not having a go, I just think there’s a bit of a fallacy when it comes to conversion, which is also not free with your pc drawing additional power for days/weeks on end to do this. For me quality is king these days and I always try and obtain the highest quality for any single media file I want to keep for ever.
I’m not really sure I understand why you are starting a movie at the beginning and then seeking to the middle either? If I select a chapter roughly in the middle of the movie it starts immediately whether that’s a 1gb file it a 100gb file. Unless you are talking about transcoding, which I also never do. Everything, even remotely, is played direct from the original file