Quoting Winston Smith:

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To duplicate my own library on HDD would take approximately 150TB of Hard Drive Space , that does not include OS, Backup or any software, just not economically practical.

Can I please see the equation behind this number?

Quoting KinoNiki:

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Physical media collectors are a dying race after all

I'm sure you can submit an irrefutable proof of that or I will see it as a bland statement...

Quoting mediadogg:

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Quoting Kulju:

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Quoting Winston Smith:

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To duplicate my own library on HDD would take approximately 150TB of Hard Drive Space , that does not include OS, Backup or any software, just not economically practical.

Can I please see the equation behind this number?

Actually 10,000 discs consisting of 8,000 DVD and 2,000 BD gets up in that range:

(8,000 x 6GB) + (2,000 x 40GB) = 48TB + 80TB = 128TB. 

Only reason I aswered this was that my initial reaction was "no way," but actually it is actually quite conceivable, I have to admit! (I used my own estimates for the average size of a DVD and BD). Even if I divide by two or three, personally I usually have 2 copies of digital media that has a backup spinning, or 3 copies spinning if I have no backup. (Backup = a copy on a different PC or on disc.).

Yep.  This is the reason I can't convince myself to go the HDD way, even though I would like too.  Maybe within the next few years, if we start seeing 20+TB drives reasonably priced, I'll take the dive.

Just as a curiosity, how much time did it take to "process" 76+77 DVDs?

Quoting mediadogg:

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Actually 10,000 discs consisting of 8,000 DVD and 2,000 BD gets up in that range

That's true, but I (or actually he) was talking about Skip's collection. Based on his online collection he has ~5000 discs. I didn't check, but I doubt that even 500 of 'em aren't Blu-rays.

Kulju:

I found the tone of your question to simply be argumentative therefore I won't answer it. It's a rough calculation based on the last time a did a hard one. That's as close as you get, it simply is not feasible with any sort of quality for a large collection, UI will tell you that the original calculatio n included everything not just the movies, bonus features and discs as well

Well doc, it's not rocket science to make the calculation, yet he asked, for his own reasons. I saw no observation.

You can buy an UNRAID server with either 12 or 15 drives or you can build your own - I opted for the later. They have a free version that you can use three drives with - one parity and two data.  You can use any size and type (IDE/SATA) drive. The only restriction is that the parity drive has to be equal or larger than every other drive.

UNRAID runs under a custom unix OS which boots from a Flash drive - creates a RAM drive with the OS & software an runs under it.

I have a motherboard with six SATA ports plus two four-port SATA cards. A case with a lot of drive bays is a plus and you can get 5.25 drive bay add-ons which allow you to mount your drives onto it (built-in fans tend to be LOUD).

Creating a network share creates a top-level directory on the drives with the same name. The share contains a combined directory listing of all drives under that directory.  You can opt to enable a separate share for each drive as well.  Each share can be configured to spread out the files on all drives based on which drive has the most free space or you can opt to fill up one drive at a time - and you can exclude drives from a share too. Parity is generated on the fly which affects write speeds somewhat but you have the option of adding a cache drive. If a share is configured to use the cache drive, writing a file to the share writes the file to the cache drive first and it's made available in the share listing. With no parity on the cache drive, writes are very fast - I utilize nearly 70% of my gigabit network copying files vs 40-50% with parity. At a specified time during the night or on demand, the files on the cache drive are moved over to the other drives.