As I understand it, which I'm not sure I do, the -arrs will automatically grab torrents. In my mind, this would eat up a TB pretty quickly.

You seem to be partly misunderstanding. They only grab what you tell them to, so they won't automatically fill your disks with random videos.

What they do is grab any movies or TV series that you specify, and give you the option to upgrade them to a file size and quality limit that you set. For example, you could tell them that movies can be a maximum of 10GB per file, and TV can be a maximum of 3GB, and that you'd prefer 4k.

There are profile options that let you grab any available copy of a video, and upgrade it as better versions come along.

As long as you set it up correctly ( unlike myself) and go through your media to make sure you don't accidentally have duplicates (like I do) it shouldn't take up much space. The actual -arrs themselves don't use hardly any space.

Your question is a little odd, Torrenting "manually" and torrenting with the -arrs is the same in "process" and you will use the same amount of diskspace (not accounting for the programs themselves that is).

Using the -arrs is what make the who torrenting process a little more "automated" as you specify the content you are looking for, and once that content it available the software pulls it from whatever sites or index's you have provided in your initial setup of the programs.

No more having to look at multiple sites for something, as soon as it's online the arrr pull it and download it as soon as possible for you.

I ran mine off of a portable 2 TB HDD for a long time. Finally upgraded when I built a proper computer and put a 4 TB internal HDD in there.

I would prune the library every couple weeks as stuff got added. Tautulli (3rd party Plex monitor) provided info on what's been watched and when, so I could delete stuff.

Now I have a 14 TB HDD with a dedicated computer for Plex. I have plans on upgrading everything to a proper RAID5 array with better processing.

Just depends on what resolution and quality you decide to download. If you stick with 1080p H265, most movies are bout 1.5GB. If you want something better like 4K HDR, you'll be looking at like 20-30GB per movie I think. I would advise the former, it's easier on your hard drive and your home internet.

Massive SSDs? Nah, just a couple of 1TB drives as cache. The rest of my 120TB is spinning disks :)

When data hoarding disk space is just a construct maaaaaan

I have a simple shell script that runs every night at 4am. It sets a size limit, then it deletes one episode at a time (starting with the oldest) until the directory size is under the limit. So a first in first out system. Scheduled it 3 years ago, and i just never run out of space ever.

I have a dedicated box with multiple raid5 spinners, I have had no complaints.

A 2tb sata ssd goes for like 65 coins nowadays..pick AV1 & HEVC and you won't be able to watch that amount in a year..so you can seed for a year too! :)

It’s all highly configurable and usage heavily depends on the quality profiles you choose. If you go for 4K content it ramps up pretty quickly, 720p not so much.