Not to be rude or anything, but External RAIDs individual to the user is not really a solid soulution. It may work for 1-2 People working on one project at a time. But it just does not scale. What if someone needs to acces files of that project? they move the raid or plug their laptop on a differen workspace? Not really a great soulution IMO.

Like you say in the last part having a NAS with maybe a bit of room to grow sso 100TB might be the best option that way everyone can access the data and work accross projects. And more importantly it would offer work from a different place in the office or even work from home.

Yea with tape the compressed nr are very missleading. Thats a best case scenario where the files compress 2:1 with TAR+gzip which it literallly never does. Bestcase I have seen was 1.2:1 on a folder consisting of config files. Basically nothing nowdays is compressable you will interact with, except textfiles depending on format. So its best to always asume the raw space as the space you get

From what it sounds you want a NAS and Tape Archive.

So get a device which holds your working Projects, you mentioned arount 20-40TB which is no problem nowdays. Can be done for under 1k with of the shelf stuff.

And Tape backup for stuff you dont need regularly. Maybe chose an older generation of LTO I would look for something that can hold about 1 Project per Tape or the likes of it. LTO5 is pretty cheap used, ca be had for 500 Bucks but is only 1.5TB per tape.

Disclaimer, with LTO never look at the compressed NR, its for compressable data only which video is not. Thus with LTO9 you will only get 18TB

Why not go with a constant quality setting in the encoder instead of bitrate and filesize limitations?.

Thats what I do I feel CQ of 18 is indistiguishable from the original.

Bonus TIP when transcoding for static Use like storing and filesize reduction. always use a CPU never a GPU if you are after smallest filesize.

SSD is not archival storage. The NAND needs Power or it will lose its charge over time. Maybe not in one to 2 Years but maybe in 5-10.

If its active yes hdds are still cheaper unless you need less then 10tb