Suitable laptop specs to handle Handbrake compression well.

getmore4less

when it comes to new to you PC there are option that are up there with building ones.

The games PC shops knock them out cheaper than you can build and have loads of options to customise.

The second hand market it littered with decent yesterdays(1-3y) gen kit at very good prices.


For the money you are going to spend on a NAS you could get a new PC much more powerful than the one you have and convert that into a NAS

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-8500-vs-AMD-Phenom-II-X6-1055T-vs-Intel-i5-10505/3223vs390vs4372

seeing a dell with a i5-10505 on CEX for £240
https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail/?id=sdesdel709023b
 

JustAnotherSaver

getmore4less said:

when it comes to new to you PC there are option that are up there with building ones.

The games PC shops knock them out cheaper than you can build and have loads of options to customise.

The second hand market it littered with decent yesterdays(1-3y) gen kit at very good prices.


For the money you are going to spend on a NAS you could get a new PC much more powerful than the one you have and convert that into a NAS

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-8500-vs-AMD-Phenom-II-X6-1055T-vs-Intel-i5-10505/3223vs390vs4372

seeing a dell with a i5-10505 on CEX for £240
https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail/?id=sdesdel709023b
 

Yeah I noticed that when scouring the sales pages & even the pre-builts brand new.

When I built mine, it ticked all boxes at the time & overall I was happy with the price.

It looks like there's going to be a huge gap in price between building & buying already done, be that used or even brand new.

Shame. I actually enjoyed piecing it together. I'm not about to spend money for no good reason though.

getmore4less

I think you said you had been juggling your storage using you current pc and swapping in/out disks.

That's creating work(reboot every swap) and not great for the PC

They do caddies/docking stations for that job, 2 bay are not expensive.
Some also do cloning.
Might be something to look at to supplement you NAS strategy to make use of your older disks without having to open up the PC to do it.


Are you are trying to do to much on the cheap?

Not enough storage for your mass of stuff not enough computer power to do the tasks you want to do...

JustAnotherSaver

getmore4less said:

They do caddies/docking stations for that job, 2 bay are not expensive.
Some also do cloning.
Might be something to look at.

This is something I've been noticing lately while having a bit going on.

Easy when you know how kind of thing. A lot of the problem has just been simply knowing what products are available. Not being aware is a big hold up.

This spans beyond working on the computer. I've been having jobs around the house to do the past few weeks where we've had various issues that need sorting & I couldn't really think of ways to sort them to a degree I'd be happy with.

Then you'll ask somewhere online or you'll watch a video on YouTube & someone goes basically "this product sorted me out" & you weren't even aware there was such a thing.

Now you know such a product exists, you can get one ordered & the whole thing has been sorted.

getmore4less said:

Are you are trying to do to much on the cheap?

Not enough storage for your mass of stuff not enough computer power to do the tasks you want to do...

I would argue not so.

If anything, I've actually spent too much the past couple months or so, but it had gotten to a stage where (within reason) i didn't much care about cost any more ... jobs had just accumulated over time that I had never gotten round to sorting, leading to now having one big ball of jobs & I just want the whole thing sorted because it's royally peeing me off having all this stuff needing doing.

The computer power - well, the PC is just old. Can't really do much about that beyond buying a new one but then I'm shelling out on other things at the moment & I have to prioritise & draw the line somewhere.

Storage - I've just bought a new 8TB drive which I was going to do anyway but then had to buy a 6TB drive in addition to that which I hadn't planned for. That's about £300 gone. On top of that I bought an 8TB WD Elements external drive at about £150 this week but when connected it just wasn't showing up in Computer. Took about 20 minutes & a good number of tries and various ports, restarting the PC, messing about here & there for it to finally show.

And after what's happened with my drive recently, I'm not taking the chance so it's going back. May well be a PC issue, a port issue or whatever. May or may not be the brand new drive itself. As it's new I'd doubt it but it came from Amazon so maybe it's been launched off a 10 storey building. But it didn't connect quickly so it's going back. I'm not risking it happening again.

getmore4less

your storage woes say otherwise

IF you can't afford the storage and backup space stop collecting stuff till you can.

You were shuffling backups and lost data because you did not have enough storage.

Maybe you can cut your needs by identifying everything that can be recovered from elsewhere even if that takes time less need for a copy

Needs good records of what you have and where you got it from and regular checks it is still available 

If there is time investment like compressing then archive solutions for the stuff that will never change again.
Although that falls into the trap of better compression is now available perhaps they need to be done again.
  

[Deleted User]

JustAnotherSaver said:

This is something I've been noticing lately while having a bit going on.

Easy when you know how kind of thing. A lot of the problem has just been simply knowing what products are available. Not being aware is a big hold up.

So this relates to what I referred to in a number of posts recently - start by expressing the problem and requirements succinctly and allowing the crowd on the forum to provide a range of solutions rather than starting with a solution (laptop and handbrake) and trying to make it fit around the problem.

For example:

1. State the problem in a couple of sentences without posing solutions - eg for this thread you could have put:

"I'd like to transcode approx 100 existing Blu-rays movies with another 3-4 per week long term on to my own storage. I want to maintain visual quality for watching on a 4k TV but save around 50-75% of the storage requirements. My budget is £300, what hardware and software would you suggest makes that process easy and efficient?"

2. The budget available

3. Any other constraints such as urgency / time

4. You level of technical ability

JustAnotherSaver

[Deleted User] said:

So this relates to what I referred to in a number of posts recently - start by expressing the problem and requirements succinctly and allowing the crowd on the forum to provide a range of solutions rather than starting with a solution (laptop and handbrake) and trying to make it fit around the problem.

For example:

1. State the problem in a couple of sentences without posing solutions - eg for this thread you could have put:

"I'd like to transcode approx 100 existing Blu-rays movies with another 3-4 per week long term on to my own storage. I want to maintain visual quality for watching on a 4k TV but save around 50-75% of the storage requirements. My budget is £300, what hardware and software would you suggest makes that process easy and efficient?"

2. The budget available

3. Any other constraints such as urgency / time

4. You level of technical ability

You make a fair point & I can't say you're anything but right with it.

But it makes me laugh as I've literally made a very similar point on the other thread.

As in you guys who are in the know sometimes need to stop playing the role of politician & Sherlock (no, not all of you do, some are quite bad for it & others don't fall in to that category at all). The Cat6 question was perfect example. Really a very basic question. The first response was absolutely ridiculous. People just going too far with it.

So, not always me and no I know you didn't say it was.