if you have a moment, can you expand on the appeal of a "fake" channel built out of your own media library? because i guess i don't really get it.

do you miss the passive consumption of media, where you just turn it on and something is going?

Prices on recertified enterprise hard drives which were datahoarder go to have more than doubled from their late 2024 prices due to AI demand. And they look like they might go higher.

Obviously IF the AI bubble pops (big if) in a dramatic way (government doesn't just bail out big players and consolidation occurs with all assets being centralized rather than going on the auction block so you can bid on them) these prices could decrease but right now barring a catastrophic collapse I wouldn't bet on prices getting any lower before 2028/9 and it could continue to be bad through the early 2030s. Just no way to know for certain, all we can say is the golden age is likely over forever and won't return even if prices crash a bit they won't quite reach the old lows.

Take as an example a 22TB recertified enterprise hard drive from a seller like serverpartsdeals. It's sitting at $650 right now. Before the current AI crisis you could buy a brand new one direct from the manufacturer for about $700 and could get one same condition recertified from a company like that for just under $300 at times in late 2024 and early 2025. Even by December 2025 they were "only" $400.

So your budget will need to be higher. There are two choices:

1. Gambling. Try to look for good deals on used but well taken care of drives from individuals upgrading to something bigger on places like ebay, marketplace, etc (scammers do exist) and accept smaller drive sizes of single digit terabytes, maybe 14TB if lucky and the gambling that comes with no warranty and a used item that could fail any time.

2. Just get whatever you can afford, get a recertified drive from goharddrive or serverpartsdeals of a smaller size but with a real warranty (understanding your warranty may only get you a refund and prices could be higher at that point to replace). Beware both companies especially on ebay sell drives with bad sectors and 90 day warranties which are more in the gambling area. If you want some peace of mind it doesn't usually cost that much more for a drive that has a 2-5 year warranty from them.

As to the NAS itself camp the used marketplaces and look for someone upgrading, learn what new prices were for such units to price in what's fair for used and realize that not all NAS are built the same and some are really beefy monsters capable of transcoding 8 streams in 4k at once and hosting a ton of services and others are so old they cannot even do HD transcoding (though you should IMO strive for directplay where possible I understand not everyone wants to upgrade all their viewing devices to enable this). I would not personally buy any NAS that is older than 8 years. Looking for a used working NAS may also net you someone selling one with their old drives included which could be a good way of getting decently taken care of drives at a decent price (just don't overpay for the privilege).

Research, research, research because if you don't know ahead of time roughly what a good NAS looks like and a good price is you'll hesitate for a day and the good deal will sell or worse you'll jump on a bad deal thinking you'll lose out to someone else and be stuck with it.

You could also salvage an old office PC like a Dell, Lenovo thinkcenter and use that as your NAS. Those are also sold on marketplace but I wouldn't buy any with a CPU older than 12 years and I wouldn't pay more than about $100 if that. Just beware the small form factor (SFF) ones may look nice and compact but they also usually have only one slot for a 3.5" HDD for storing things and some may not even have that (always check and confirm) while the full size mini-towers often have two slots. This will use more energy and your drives can get hotter than in a NAS but it can be cheaper.

Yeah. The cheapest option has always been an optical drive + a library card, but now more than ever.

Assuming you have a halfway-decent public library nearby, of course.

In addition to every other part of NAS. Except maybe the cabling.