Been using ubuntu for almost 15 years. My annoyance with snap made me just switch to bazzite (gaming focused fedora atomic ). Takes a little getting used to since its immutable but im liking it alot more so far.

Been running factory refurbished. Thats the important part. It must say factory refurbs. Ive had one failure in 5-6 years and was warranty replaced

I assume youve seen trashs guides. But yea I get it. Im sure your aware reencoding can kill quality too. Many grab the blueray and then reencode that to hevc just depends what works

Why dont you just redownload hevc on whats available and convert the rest?

Nowadays thats less than 10 drives. I literally just ordered 10 20 tb drives to fill my second nas.

I have two synolygy 1019+ with ds 517 expansion units. That 10 drives for each set. Technically i could set that up to have about 400 tb usable.

I buy factory recertified drives for about 200 ea. with a couple spares.yea its a chunk of change but not too crazy.

I have multiple friends with more than a pb.

Thats about a few days worth of downloads for me. Over 150tb raw 80 tb used