That's a very pessimistic estimate for idling PC-based storage box.

The story looks faked all over the place. 30 TB? I have as much, and the storage price was maybe $600 last year.

The rest of the computer costs money too. They maybe overpaid a bit, but it's not totally unreasonable.

If one want cost savings, why do they need a separate computer? And if the need is somehow there, you could always buy a used one.

I have no idea what HDD prices were like the past few years. I recently bought an 18TB HDD for 280 Euros. Much of it is for pirated stuff. Thing is ... there are benefits to having the content locally that aren't priced into paying for streaming sites. There are things I can't watch on Netflix/Amazon, for example, and I have a consistent level of quality. I would need the storage one way or another, so I don't really count it towards pirating. Electricity? I pay for that either way, whether I'm pirating or not. I'll pay for a seedbox or usenet, but that's still only 50-80 Euros total. If I paid for everything I pirate, that would be hundreds every month on top of electricity and storage.

Hard drive prices fluctuate a lot. I put this together in early 2018.

In early 2018 an 8TB seagate drive cost ~$200 according to https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm .

I'm also counting usable storage, not snapraid or anything like that. The reality is it's 39.12 TiB not counting SSD cache.

> The story looks faked all over the place.

I also bought a pretty nice case that can store 10+ hard drives, and a PCIe sata adapter. I probably could have done it for cheaper, but that's not really a reason to call me a liar is it? Why would anyone fake this?

Don't take it personally. I am just being skeptical because you created a new account. Does the country where you are actively prosecute piracy, or are you a public person, who does not want their relationship with copyright disclosed for the sake of keeping public image?

My regular account is pretty closely related to me professionally. My current country does not activity prosecute piracy but there's no telling what the future will bring career wise. It's not only prosecution that I'd be worried about, it's also persecution.

The way I read it he is including the computer in that $1200 cost. Seems realistic, that's about what my computer (surplus Supermicro server) with a similar amount of storage came out to.

I got a pretty nice case too. The computer was my old desktop when I upgraded, so I'm only sort of counting it. It wasn't a budget build.

It depends how much redundancy they have. They could have 30TB mirrored, which means 60TB worth of physical drives.

In what world is a server that presumably sits most of the day doing nothing averaging 200W 24/7?

If that content is sourced from torrents you'll have a lot of disks spinning all the time just to seed tiny chunks so that's not unreasonable.

OP probably only has 5-6 drives at most (more likely 3x 10TB), which should draw 15W-20W each _at most_, and that's at 100% utilization not reading a small file.

Also, OP included a Usenet subscription in their costs so they might not be torrenting at all.

200w idle is kind of insane though.