You need ot think about how often you need to access the data. If it’s once or twice a year, then the added overhead of having to find and load a tape wouldn’t add up that quickly and IMO should be acceptable.

However, for projects you currently work on, you’d want hard drives and/or SSDs, preferably on a network, I suppose. Unless all your in0flight footage resides on the computers you edit them on (in which case I hope they have redundant storage).

Also, if any of your clients needed some archived data, would it be feasible to come back to the tapes, read, upload and share them? If you had a NAS and a fast enough internet connection, you may be able to host a site yourself, thus no need for reading the tape and uploading to a cloud.

Also, if it’s video footage, then you shouldn’t really count on LTO’s compression ability. It’s not particularly good for pictures and videos.

If you allow some self-promotion:

http://robertzs.com/nvidia-vgpus-for-gaming/

Have a look on ebay, there are some good deals to be had. You could probably get an LTO-5 for around $150-200, although you’ll need a SAS controller and cabling, which could add an extra $50. So the initial cost is definitely higher, but once you’re past that, it’s much nicer to have large 1.5-2.5TB tapes than lots of discs.

If you’re hoarding that much data and you need cold storage, you may want to have a look at tapes. LTO-5 and LTO-6 drives are quite cheap to come by and tapes are less expensive than discs on a per-GB basis.

setting up a pfSense router is cool.

you can use docker to run some local services and give them their own domain names with pfsense

if you want to progress further, you can use traefik to give docker/kubernetes services hostnames and get a cloudflare certificate to enable https on everything

Depends on the resolution. Four 1080p displays would probably be okay. Four 4K monitors? Not so much.

NVMe drive to a SAS controller? Nope.

SAS drive to an NVME connector? That’s probably doable, as NVMe is just PCIe, to which you could connect a SAS controller.

MiniSAS is just a plug that has four SAS connections running through it.

I’m running some gaming VMs on a Xeon E5-2699 v3. Good enough for older titles at 1080p, but the per-core performance isn’t very competitive anymore.

Interesting, but mind you that some USB-C adapters may only be rated for 5V 3A or 12V 3A and will not be able to deliver the full rated 45/60/100W of power at lower voltages.

I tend to see 10G SFP+ modules for under $10, LCLC fibre cables are the same for ~10m lenghts and a NIC is, as you said, around $30. So fibre is cheap, but you can also occasionally find Aquantia-based 10GBASE-T (RJ-45) NICs which can do NBASE-T (2.5G and 5G) for $35, which is a good price, considering that these are generally more efficient than the older Intel chipsets and are just as fast.

That aside, your plan sounds good, I hope it’ll work out well for you. USB3 adapters are also viable for 2.5G, so you can easily connect laptops and mini PCs that don’t necessarily have extra thunderbolt or PCIe connectivity for a 10G NIC. What I suggest you avoid is the 5G USB3-based NICs, because in reality, they can only do around 3.5G and they also run much hotter and are significantly more expensive than the 2.5G variants.

Just wanted to say thank you for all. I’m set up with Logitech Media Server and couldn’t be happier. The fact that it has a Truecharts app on TrueNAS Scale is just the icing on the cake.