For me this is a hobby as well as a lot of OCD , So when i started every thing went onto 2tb portable hd's then when i had two of them i copied onto a 4tb portable hd , keeping the 2tb's for back up , when i had four 4tb hd's i copied them to a 18tb 3.5 hd , keeping the 4tb hd's as backup , freeing up the 2tb's to continue the proccess . All up i have two 18tb with eight 4tb's as backup for them and have a 4tb running now with two 2tb's as backup for it, i'm currently filling another 2tb , and have four or so 2tb's to continue the whole thing. Its a bit of a commitment but also a little expensive
I started-out digitizing my optical media library with an 8TB WD NAS, and I thought
"I'll never fill that up".
Then, once that was full, I bought a Synology 4-bay NAS and loaded it with 16TB drives (the largest drive on the compatibility list), and I thought
"I'll never fill that up".
Then, once that was full, I bought the 5-bay expansion unit and loaded it with 16TB drives, and I thought
"I'll never fill that up".
Then, once that was full, I started buying spare drive trays and playing 'musical hard drives', which I've been doing ever since.
I'm currently at 248TB of media (not counting any PC storage) and I'm adding a 16TB drive roughly every three months. (And trust me, I feel your pain with regard to the
"little expensive" comment!)
I'm now saving-up for a new 36-bay Synology NAS so I can have access to all my media without swapping-out drives all the time. Once that's full, I'll be well on my way to having a Petabyte of storage!
I'm maybe a little over halfway through my optical media collection at the moment (although it's still growing almost as fast as I'm working on it), I still have boxes and boxes of DVDs in storage, and I haven't even started on the UltraHD content yet. I expect that will suck-up HDD space even quicker.
I've also learned to stop thinking
"I'll never fill that up" !!!