I currently have a very comfortable lil home server with the arrs and plex (would like jellyfin but it's not there yet for me, currently fielding emby given how Plex is going), basically all sources are usenet.
I'm nearing a point where I either have to delete some stuff or expand space, which is not cheap, and some of my older drives are likely due for some failures too. So after seeing the popularity of debrid I've been wondering if it'd be worth to instead spend the money on it, but would like to ask some questions. I spend maybe around $70/year on the various bits for Usenet and I expect I'd have to spend around an average of $80/year on drives for just expanding storage (obviously assuming I don't just delete stuff). And that's with avoiding 4k just for storage reasons (my internet could take the streaming tho)
Even just the price of Usenet seems to be more than the price of a debrid subscription though and from what I understand I'd not need new disks with it either.
From what I understand debrid is a shared download space for Torrents/direct downloads where if someone adds something it's available for everyone (presumably it gets deleted if noone accessed it for some time and would have to be re-downloaded?). It's possible to mount the content via WebDAV to make it accessible to clients/media servers to stream directly from debrid.
My questions are..
- Is there still a point to sonarr/radarr with debrid?
- How is the quality? (both in terms of media quality and in terms of file organisation so things are discoverable and accurate, e.g. chances of things explicitly named wrong so you think you're about to watch Brooklyn 99 and instead get porn)
- I would likely go the path of using zurg and keeping with Plex/emby - any experience with how well does this work (any recommendations for or against)? What's the mechanism for picking what is available in the mounts to the media server.. or is it just.. everything on debrid?
- I don't really use any torrents at the moment, from what I understand that's primarily how you get things on debrid. Would I have to start looking for good trackers to get content or is there no need because chances are someone will have downloaded/shared most things?
- I guess, am I assuming this works very differently to how it actually does? Any experience from people who did the swap from Usenet/arrs to some debrid + media server?
Many questions in a wall of text, I'd be grateful for any answers to any of them! Thanks!
What is your storage situation currently? Just trying to figure out why you think expanding it is expensive, because hard disks have been getting cheaper. Especially used "enterprise" SAS drives - the 12TB drives can be had for under $100. You'll need a $40 HBA card and $10 breakout cables as well.
I use unraid (currently without parity since it's all just stuff I've been okay to lose) with drives I've collected over the years: 2x3TB WD red (one of which is almost 10y old, the other ~7 since it had died once in warranty and got replaced), 1x 12 TB WD red (which is ~3y old).
I was going to add something between another 16-20TB drive depending on the price/TB whenever the next expansion comes up. I've mentioned it in another comment, but I've never used not-new drives and have been fairly shy about them, hence the larger price tag for expansion than expected.
Even if I cut down on my usenet providers/indexers since I've shot a bit overboard with coverage, the cost of realdebrid/alldebrid is still very similar to just the cost of those/year, entirely excluding the cost of disks - hence my interest in feasibility.