Surprisingly, I'm going to make my money back quick. I was previously using older Supermicro machines and small hard drives that used a ton of power. This thing let me downsize power-wise (like a LOT), and I doubled my total capacity.
I think most people who have a large collection of movies have a NAS to store everything. I built mine with leftover PC parts after upgrading my main PC. Started by just throwing some extra hard drives into my old case, then incrementally upgraded it with used server parts from ebay, bigger hard drives, etc.
You'll typically want to use something like Plex or Jellyfin to serve the movies to whatever devices you're watching on. Then you'll get into docker and the Radarr/Sonarr/*arr stack...
I use unraid with 5x8TB drives, 1tb ssd as a cache drive for new transfers (writing to an ssd is faster, it then moves to the array after) 500GB NVME drive for appdata and applications and a 250GB ssd for VMs and ISOs
Ita easy to do in unraid, you set it up per share, so say you have a "media" share you can change the settings to include a cache drive and then set it to write to the cache drive first and then more to array. If you don't have a cache drive or want to add a other you can do that by installing the ssd, booting up, stopping the array and adding in a new cache drive (you can add it to your existing cache pool to increase its size or create a new one and keep them separate for separate uses)
Most people just use a NAS (self built or one of the pre-built types) & stuff a bunch of hard drives into it. Or just stuff a bunch of hard drives into their desktop(s).
Sure there are people outfitting rack(s) of server(s) but generally that's just the truly dedicated people going that route.
For what it's worth hard drives nowadays go up to ~22TB so your 34TB example would only need two massive hard drives. A compact NAS or small desktop would work fine for that example.
I have DIY All in One server made of desktop components. 250GB SSD for OS and container volumes, 500GB SSD for nextcloud and 12TB HDD (toshiba refurbished from Amazon) for media. At some point Ill make a raid, but for now sticking with the cheapest option with no issues (or just lucky). I backup nextcloud and docker volumes to HDD and to backblaze daily, but I dont need backup or redundancy for media (read: I dont see myself spending a lot of money for files that can be redownloaded anytime)
I run a supermicro chassis with 6 3TB drives in a RAID6 using a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Old school for these days but works for my needs for now. Drives were free from a buddy of mine so until they start dying or I need more space, they'll do. Then I have two 120GB intel enterprise SSDs for running Proxmox. VMs and LXCs are all on the spinning disks which surprisingly perform well enough.
If you're concerned about privacy, you could build your own NAS. It's more work, but also more powerful for the money. Wolfgang's Channel on YouTube has quite a few videos about low power diy home server.
Have a Synology DS218+ with 2x 14TB in raid 1. So just 14TB total capacity one drive redundancy. I have over 500 movies a bunch of series and it's like... 4tb full or something?
I use an HP micro server gen 8 running truenas scale. Upgraded the memory to 16gb and upgraded the processor as well. 4bays with 14TB Seagate exos drives. Holds everything I'll ever need for a long while.
HP DL380 G7 with 10TB 2.5" drives & an Iomega PX4-300R NAS with 12 TB 3.5" drives. The HP runs all my 'arrs as well as does any coding work & acts as preliminary storage. Drives have cost me more than the server & NAS units.
Why did you opt for a setup with 2.5" disks? I ask because I just replaced my track server because the 2.5" are just more expensive than a server replacement plus 3.5" disks where I'm from (with 4x10tb).
I run a supermicro chassis with 6 3TB drives in a RAID6 using a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Old school for these days but works for my needs for now. Drives were free from a buddy of mine so until they start dying or I need more space, they'll do. Then I have two 120GB intel enterprise SSDs for running Proxmox. VMs and LXCs are all on the spinning disks which surprisingly perform well enough.
I run a supermicro chassis with 6 3TB drives in a RAID6 using a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Old school for these days but works for my needs for now. Drives were free from a buddy of mine so until they start dying or I need more space, they'll do. Then I have two 120GB intel enterprise SSDs for running Proxmox. VMs and LXCs are all on the spinning disks which surprisingly perform well enough.
I have a Synology NAS with 4x 12 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro drives (one drive as redundancy), as well as 2x 500 GB WD Red SN700 SSD caches. I also upgraded the RAM from 4 to 12 GB, so it can run more services in parallel without chocking. The total cost was about 1500€ for a little less than 36 TB usable disk space and imo very nice performance.
I have a Dell server with 12 disks ranging from 12 tb to 22 tb. I'm looking to replace it with a supermicro server that can hold 36 disks instead. It runs unraid so I can upgrade dissimilar disks easily.