“Lossless” isn’t the term you want; that refers to not lossily compressing the main data. Lossless compression or storage of media is very rare outside of text and sometimes audio, because it ends up so large.

You want to preserve metadata. That applies regardless of how lossy the data compression is.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

I’ve certainly never heard of a chicken ranch, but plenty of chicken farms.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

Biggest question to me is why you need an IP in the first place?

You rapidly end up with a freeloader issue.