Around October of 2021 I was running out of disk space on my 6TB hard drive that I had acquired back on November 2015, so I decided to upgrade to the newest and greatest storage solutions of all time: 14TB of block storage! I went ahead and purchased a WD Elements 14TB USB 3.0 external hard drive, proceeded to format it down and get it ready for storing all my useful content.
From October 2021 to July 2025 I completely filled that volume up, and just recently hit the 100% usage. What to do? By the looks of the graph I figured that out without having to delete any files…
[matt@thinwheat usb14]$ sudo du -h --max-depth=1 2>/dev/null
16K ./lost+found
554G ./VHS-Video
5.1T ./Video
4.1T ./Twitch
86G ./Video.fsem
4.0K ./repos-backup
2.3T ./Archive-backup
88G ./Camera
13.0T .The initial assessment of all my content found that I had 4.1TB of “streaming twitch” videos inefficiently stored in x264/near lossless. I also had other video content that was stored in other formats but I was more certain that the twitch videos could be renovated.
Unfortunately I couldn’t do all this work on my linux host since was only running 4 x Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz, and that’s not gonna chew through anything quick and easy. I decided to employ my windows host which boasts 12 x AMD Ryzen 5 5600x @ 3.70GHz.
The compression was straight forward with ffmpeg: libx265, crf 22, preset medium. No changing audio since that would give me no significant advantage to saving disk space.
11 days later I was able to compress 4.1TB of data to 1.1TB of smoothly beautiful data. Space saved for many, many additional years of storing more useless data.