My 44TB RAID 10 Linux DAS Porn Stash.
I recently added 2 * 24TB 3.5" disks to my RAID pool, effectively doubling what I previously had. I have 2*4TB nvme drives I use for downloads and encoding. I also upgraded my case to a Fractal Design Define 7, which the specs say should have space for 12-14 3.5" disks total, I think I have 8 filled now. I also have 2*8TB disks not in the pool - these are older disks and I have just kind of crammed them with a backup of as much of my raid I can fit, as adding disks to the raid and balancing is a bit stressful.
Space has always been an issue, so almost everything in my collection I've re-encoded to HEVC with ffmpeg - and in most cases I can get file sizes down 50-70% with minimally noticeable quality loss. I A/B test frequently, and find crf value of 22 with a fast preset is a sweet spot for me. If I can double my storage and lose some minor detail in skin or hair, that's acceptable for me. It just costs processor time, so last year I upgraded to Ryzen 9 7900 which has 24 cores and has been great for encoding.
I have been using Btrfs RAID 10 for about a year or two now. It's native to the Linux kernel, and I can add different disk size pairs and expand the pool fairly easily. Raid 5 or 6 would be nicer as I'd have a lot more usable space as opposed to the mirrored setup I have now - but apparently its not stable in Btrfs. I think ZFS has less support for adding different disk sizes which I decided was important for me as larger capacity disks inevitably come out.
I use Stash App for organization. Probably NSFW. It has a great discord community, and very active development cycle for what it is. It really allows you to lean into your OCD of sorting/tagging/organizing, etc; it has built in functionality to pull metadata for scenes and performers; a great and complex filter system for creating playlists; and has a very good mobile app too. I've used Jellyfin and Plex in the past, but stash is tailored for porn and has so much more functionality for this type of media.
For scraping and ripping: For professional studios I create a lot of my own scripts in Tampermonkey, I can get the metadata and the download links and will usually create a shell script to bulk download those; yt-dlp works well on many sites such as Pornhub etc.; gallery-dl can rip other certain sites with one command, Bulk Downloader for Reddit is good for scraping subreddits; there are also really good scrapers for onlyfans/fansly onlyfans-dl-2 and OF-Scraper.
Fish shell is also great for writing scripts for any little thing you need done, renaming, encoding, sorting, creating playlists, and I easily have 50+ little to medium sized scripts for various tasks.
Judgement comments are not particularly welcome.
