There's an 18 TB refurb from serverpartdeals right now. Or there are a bunch of smaller new ones in the $20s on Amazon. The analysis doesn't really change even if you're looking at e.g. $30/TB. It's still hundreds or thousands of items for a year of subscription cost; more than you could reasonably watch. Even going full 8 TB SSDs at $150/TB is still thrift store cost per movie when you amortize it ($2.25 at 15GB, or $0.30 at 2GB).

Of course then as another comment here said, you're more likely to realize you don't actually want any of it. And then when you realize it's not worth pennies to store, you also realize it's not worth your time to watch.

It's $30. It used to be $10, now it's $30. It's tripled in price but it's still cheap enough for pirated movies. If that's still too much, get the 1080p version instead.

This is about $/TB on bigger drives. If you only want a 1TB drive it'll be more like $50.

Don't get an SSD, far too expensive.

That's a bluray rip. AFAIK every streaming service is way lower bitrate than that, even at maximum quality.

You might want to check your math again. 1 GB/h is 2.3 mbit/s, if we're being generous. That would be absolutely riddled with compression artifacts unless you're encoding a screensaver.

2 Mb/s is awful for anything with movement, 8 Mb/s is decent enough, 20 Mb/s is very good to my eyes, and 80 Mb/s is nice, clearly better especially in scenes with significant movement, but it's not revolutionary. I don't watch webrips unless there's no other option, it's mostly WEB-DL or bluray rips.

You can also pre-transcode your own media and even delete the originals if you want.

How many streaming platforms do you pay for each month? The cost of that drive is probably 2-3 months worth of streaming rental payments.

You don't have to store the media indefinitely

Seriously I can’t even get my refurb enterprise drives for reasonable prices anymore. Used to pay like $150 for 14TB ultrastars now it’s like $300 for 12TB exos

Yes I am aware, it is why you don’t buy new, there are thousands of used computers out there that I made a side hustle out of buying them and reselling them after some cleaning and fixing, so many I found that’s beyond to list here, but for example I got asus zenbook 14 for $12 because it didn’t boot (which was just a loose connection inside), a macmini m1 for $50, and many other parts and finds. I even have a thinkpad with proxmox and run as a server, uptime now is more than a year.