Used enterprise drives and a SAS controller. Last batch of SAS drives I bought were 16TB for $115 each.
Unraid (and I think ZFS and Ceph as well) supports adding drives 1-by-1 and different sized drives to your array. You can just buy single drives or spares whenever a sale comes around to keep expanding your storage.
All of the *arr apps are for automatic media downloading and organization.
You want all the new seasons of a show? Just mark that as a ‘monitored’ show in sonarr. When new episodes are released, sonarr uses your torrent indexer to get the torrent or magnet link and sends that to your torrent downloader. Once the download completes, it renames the file with metadata and puts it into the spot where jellyfin/plex is expecting the file to be.
It’s an automation stack for media piracy.
SpaceInvaderOne has a bunch of tutorials on how to set things up if you want to dive into the full self-hosting ocean.
I don’t think there’s a c/datahoarder. But that was exactly what the reddit community was called.
The person you’re arguing with is likely running a private ‘netflix’ instance using Jellyfin or Plex. It’s not my cuppa, but I think I have every episode of every season of Below Deck, Love Island, and Bachelor/Bachelorette on my instance.
You start running out of space pretty quickly when a dozen people are using it for their daily media consumption.