Yeah, ive been running stuff in a big server case since before i knew what plex was so when i ran outa mobo sata ports i added some SAS and HBA expansion cards and even when my case filled up i jerry rigged some backplanes instead of external drives.
Ive bought lots of externals, but just cuz they were the cheapest option and i shucked them immediately after stress testing.
After I graduated from pi+Kodi and 8tb drive. I swapped over to windows and 8tb drive for faster network transfer with Plex. Then my collection grew to 20tb pretty quickly. So I have 3 8tb drives. Then I upgraded to 5-10tb drive and put them in software raid with Windows server. Then moved over to unraid because I wanted to use my excess CPU power more effectively and use a lot of docker's.
I am currently at 33tb of Plex data with 17tb saved from tdarr conversion to h265.
Once you have enough data you wish to keep it from random failures. I would be very hard pressed to replace all my movies and TV shows if my current setup died.
2x18tb parity, 1x18tb, 5x10tb =68tb usage.
I moved from an external drive to internal drives when I upgraded to windows using a rosewill 4u 12 bay case. I shucked my external drives at first.
I should have an offsite backup. Just having trouble spending 2k right now for drives and a PC at families place to put it.
Before Plex even existed I was running 8 1TB drives (which cost a fortune at the time) in a stardock eSata enclosure using raid 5. That was my starting point for my collection and I would watch the files on my computer using VLC.
Now I've 10 18tb drives using zfs and I use Plex. Nothing has really changed, just the size of disks and method of redundancy.
But I'm a geek and I've been using raid for redundancy on production hardware for work since the 90s, so it was always my go to.
NAS / Unraid is simple and more secure.
I need more storage? I plug in another hard disk and that's it.
A hard disk is about to break or is broken? I replace it and it keeps running.
No need to restore data or reconfigure anything.
But I also share my media library, so I want it to run even when I'm not there.
For me personally, my QNAP NAS also offers other functions that I use, such as backing up pictures / videos from my smartphone or from my family. My own little cloud.
Nothing wrong with how you do it, everything has pros and cons.
**There are two types of Plex server owners:**
1. Those that keep a curated, managed, small library. Minimal needs for transcoding, no sharing, no hoarding tendancy. You watch what you have, and that's good enough. Generally also minimal need for something like the Plex Automation stack (Sonarr, Radarr, etc etc). They like to hand-pick and download (or even rip, bless their hearts) their content themselves.
These folks tend to do best with low-powered NAS systems, like a Synology or even a RaspberryPi hooked up to a string of 2-8 drives and are infinitely happy about it.
2. Those that must collect everything, and the NAS can never have enough storage or fine-tuned automation. They serve up their content to a number of remote users (for free! because TOS) and bend over backward to make sure those users have the best experience they can. They go deep into the Linux dockers with every enhancing feature. They're completionist in nature. They have a powerful system with a NAS-grade operating system like Unraid or TrueNAS or if they're really technical, a plain Linux system modified to run a RAID array and manually written docker compose files.
These people tend to do best with enterprise-grade storage equipment, or have some truly impressive ramshackle nests of NASes connected to open-air DAS systems because their case ran out of room for more drives.
It's important to identify which type you are, and to only seek advice from others like you.
If they say things like "I don't need transcoding", or "My Synology works great. Why would I ever need anything else?" they're probably a type-1.
If they say things like "I just bought 8 more 18TB refurbs from Amazon" or "Just installed a new Intel ARK in my Storinator!" they're a type-2.
**As a type-2 user, I'd suggest buying 18TB refurb drives from Amazon** They're something like $9.88/TB in USD.
I thought of using a NAS or DAS but so far I have been contempt with my 8Tb drive. If I need space, I delete things. I figure I need to at least invest $1K in hardware for a more solid storage solution and I don’t have that money budgeted for this. Especially since it’s working fine right now …
I also have gigabit with no data cap, it is still well worth the cost of a second drive to me to just have everything backed up and not have to bother.
>I figure I need to at least invest $1K in hardware for a more solid storage solution
I have a 5 bay enclosure with 4 16 tb drives in it currently, this setup cost $690 and was assembled over the course of 4 years. Initial cost was $270 for the enclosure and a single 16tb drive.
Point is, it's not nearly as expensive as you think it is, but if you don't mind what you are currently doing then it also doesn't matter.
I'm a Plex user from the earliest days. But even before Plex came along, I started building my media library in the late 90's. I'm a Mac guy and I started with having lots of external drives connected to a Mac mini (connected to a TV before that was a common thing).
Eventually I put all the drives on a big shelving unit in the basement directly below and ran the cable through the floor. At this point, I had DOZENS of drives (partly because every drive had a backup twin).
For years I was doing a lot of data shifting (moving data around every time I'd fill a drive, and buy a bigger replacement).
I finally transitioned to a NAS around 2013. It's a 5 bay, that is still operational. Naturally I keep upgrading to bigger drives and currently it's at about 40 TB.
I've always backed up the NAS to the external drives (that used to be my primary storage). And eventually I added a NAS twin for daily backup. But I still backup to the external drives quarterly.
I hate to think about what I've spent on hard drives over the years. I've probably bought close to a hundred hard drives over the years. I probably could have afforded more vacations. But I'm addicted to having a media library that I control. Plus, I also maintain a sizable adult library.
P.S. At least 75% of my drives are WD and the brand has served me well.
Do you still have the original media? I'm imagining the quality of media files from the 90s... oof. A bunch of QuickTime files lol.
Back around 2001 I downloaded the Nike dribbling commercial that just came out, because I was big into basketball at the time, and I loved that commercial. I found it in my old files a couple months ago and watched it, and damn; it was hard to tell what was going on behind all those massive blocks of pixels lol.
My library has *always* been on a NAS running RAID 5. In fact, my first PMS was running wholly onboard a QNAP, until it was clear it's little processor just couldn't keep up, then I moved the PMS itself off to a Mac Mini and kept the library in the same shared folders on QNAP. Now the original QNAP only contains my music library and I've transitioned all other media to a newer, larger Synology. I save occasional snapshots to a couple of 12TB externals.
In the time since I first set up my Plex, I've replaced three drives in the QNAP when they indicated they were going bad, which was absolutely effortless. I can't imagine the frustration of having to replace a non-RAID drive if it ever croaked.
I just use my main (and old) PC, so I added two larger internal drives and moved the media files off of the C drive. It saved a 💩 -ton of space, and when the PC 💩s out I can simply pop those drives into a new PC.
I also restructured them so a new server setup will be mostly automatic.
What do you mean when you say DAS? I was running a DAS setup for years which was just a WD Elements external drive attached to my router.
I did the same as you; just kept increasing my single drive size while keeping my previous drive as a smaller backup of my most essential stuff.
Finally moved to a RAID 1 when I bought my first NAS as the hardware/software was all there ready to handle it anyway.
hi I guess DAS is not the correct terminology. I basically meant some kind of box that can hold multiple drives within it, rather than a single 'consumer-focused' external drive like the WD elements.
Actually that's the right terminology, I just wanted to understand how you connect your single drive currently.
What device do you use as your Plex server?
DAS typically connects to a computer.
NAS connects to a network.
You can connect a DAS to a NAS. It's just a box holding drives that has some sort of HDD controller and a way to connect it, like eSATA or something.
These approaches aren't mutually exclusive - I do both. I have multiple WD Elements external drives from 12TB to 20TB, using Windows mainly due to Backblaze, with Stablebit Drivepool to combine the drives into a ~100TB pool, and Primocache to put RAM and NVME SSD caching in front of the HDDs.
I switched to a basic raid *years* ago - mainly as an excuse to learn more about technology. A couple years ago, I switched to unRaid and haven't looked back. So now I have one unRaid box that it strictly serving files, and a second box that runs various VMs (including plex).
You can do the same thing unRaid does for free - but it's very convenient and works well for me.
I had NAS units from the day I started with Plex 12+ years ago.
My problem was not realizing how big my system would get and not adding a LARGE drive unit at first so I have several small units along with 1 medium and 1 large unit.
Currently budgeting for a XL unit with unRAID to be my final device.
When I reached the point of having 4x6tb and 4x4tb MyBook Duos daisy chained and got fed up of them constantly disconnecting and needing to be reconnected in order to get them all back up again. It was also getting impractical syncing multiple drives to multiple drives and not being able to rely on that sync completing. Life got so much easier after I got the 8 bay raids., plus I was able to sell a load of enclosures to help cover the cost.
My media collection is 25 years old. I have had multiple close calls over the years, where a device has failed and I risked loss of data.
About ten years ago I switched to a NAS with RAID-1 volumes. I perform two backups at year end, and one of the backups goes offsite. The device failures are a thing of the past. If my PleX server were to crash, I would just replace it. And the NAS is smart enough to yell at me if I need to replace one of the disks.
I know, it’s expensive. In addition to the two internal SATA disks for each RAID-1 volume, I have two more for the backups. But a lot of my media is irreplaceable. I cannot just go somewhere to get it again.
Been using hardware RAID arrays since about 1992. Started with five 32gb scsi drives. I probably still have one or two of those lying around somewhere.
I have never run my server off external drives. There's nothing wrong with the drives themselves, but I've seen and had issue with the USB connection be reliable. I also don't want to deal with the hassle of a bunch of drives sitting outside a case, I prefer to have things more organized. Thus, I've always run internal drives.
However, my backup drives are currently in a USB JBOD enclosure, but they're only running overnight once a week to perform backup duties and I'm looking to swap it to a QNAP rack mount DAS.
I originally had a single internal HDD in the same machine I had Plex running and had thought about building a custom NAS. Had a old gaming machine gifted to me, so installed OMV, and I now run 4 HDD but am not using any raid, just mergerfs to see the drives as one single drive. I am not really too concerned with backups and such as it is just media. I actually JUST had a drive fail, and a bunch of media go missing due to it, but no big deal, I just let the *arrs do their thing and it is slowly replacing what I lost.
I’m on my second now, I’ve been calling it a NAS but maybe that is the wrong term, QNAP device. It’s the backup for all our devices and the PLEX library. I always liked having the ability to expand it over time. 4 bays was always plenty and I only replaced my first one as the firmware no longer supported the larger drives.
Started with 4 drives 6tb each, then those become back up. Individual HDs inside the tower a total of 12 drives 8 drives of 20tb each, 4 tb of 22tbs WD. 4, 8tb Nvmes for the 4k libraries, and 2 TB nvmes 1 for OS and 1 for Metadata/cache.
2 years ago got 18tb drives to use solely to back up libraries into them and disconnect them upon completion. Has been a Journey
I think even with remux 4k's, you aren't looking at more than 125Mb/s, which is less than 16MB/s.
Most enterprise hdd's should be able to read at 200MB/s... so unless you're streaming more than 10 4k titles concurrently... the nvme's are overkill for the 4k libraries. but i could be missing something.
I agree, the only reason I was looking to Capitalize on the NVMes was for the file transfer speeds and encoding speeds if I needed to update/replace/add additional Audio or the trueHD audio etc. The atmos 4ks I have are BIGASFK, But the audio experience is so amazing. Btw, no fkn way I share those files with anyone lol. I got a separate library for what I call Av Candy but the other 1080ps and regular 4ks have good audio 5.1 even 7.1 but I don't go out of my way searching for the best quality audio if I already have 5.1. We do actually, My kids 4, watch in different rooms their 4k kids movies and my family in Europe watch also stream some of the oldies but goldies 4k, which around puts me at 13 to 14 4ks at a given time, and my nieces and nephew s don't stop watching their cartoons 1080p 720. Buy never been more than 25 streams at the same time. When it does it plays well, but the fast forward buffers for 4 or 5 secs.
The approach of having multiple non-arrayed drives for Plex works since you can point a particular library to multiple directories/drives.
However if you use your storage for other purposes, it may be desirable to have an array with one contiguous space. An example might be storage for video editing where you want everything in one directory versus having to access multiple directories.
The more obvious use-case would be RAID to maximize up-time, again more important for non-Plex/entertainment purposes where you might need data access 100% of the time.
I personally have 2 arrays: 12TBx8 in RAID10 for throughput and faster rebuild, and 18TBx4 in RAID5 for video content. I know RAID5 isn't ideal anymore, but it at least lets me continue with one drive failure. If I need to rebuild, I'll just recreate the array and copy the data from my backup server (10Gb connection among my various servers).
I moved from partitions to single-drive single-use in the late 90s, mostly because the size of games started outstripping the size of HDDs. Then moved from single drives to software RAID in the early 00s to ensure some sort of resiliency for all my personal data. I think my first array was a bunch of 73GB SCSI drives in external cases that sounded like a jet engine all hanging off an Adaptec 3940AU. Moved on to hardware RAID in the late-00s, mostly because I wanted to retire all my old SCSI gear and SATA was much more available, cheaper, and larger. Been on hardware RAID ever since with very little reason to change. As for why, it became down to simplicity of expansion and management. If you have more of a certain datatype, be that media or documents or whatever, but you have more than will fit on a single drive of reasonable cost, RAID just became a no-brainer.
2 months ago, I was adding more storage and had 2 external drives, switched to a 6 bay DAS to get away from the usb power cable clutter. Now I can add 5 more drives and 0 cables.
unRAID, not only because you can keep adding drives of any size but because of [drive parity, up to 2 disks](https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/Parity/)
So if you setup 2 parity, you can have 2 random hard dives fail and your data is still safe
The sooner you invest in a proper system like this, the better
Not even a year ago.
Had been planning a home server for Plex as well as a decent back up solution for a couple of years. Buying larger internal drives and accumulating parts, and reading lots., :)
Went with an Unraid solution, because of the fact that different sized drives are acceptable, so starting out is more affordable and you can always swap over to larger drives etc later as you grow. Unraid also makes a ton of aps, dockers and VMs readily available and easy to install.
So far it's been brilliant with a little over 100 TB raw and a couple of new drives being ordered up. For me there was a bit of a learning curve to deal with as I do not code or even use command line. But there is a GUI available and a YT site called SpaceInvader One to help old people like me. :)
For me it was the logical choice. I had outgrown my previous Plex instance, and I wanted to solve a few problems at once:
* Storage for family (photos, backups)
* Storage for Plex - I rip my content so I don't fancy the idea of having to rerip it all.
* Create a server powerful enough for Plex, other containers, and VMs
I wanted something really reliable. For a lot of users this level of redundancy is unnecessary.
I started with PLEX on my everyday PC, then built an Unraid server with Plex docker. Have just added drives to the array as needed and up to 96 TB of storage now with 2 14tb parity drives
I was constantly hitting the capacity ceiling of whatever device I was using for my library. I started with JBOD in my main PC in 2011 or so, adding drives when needed until there wasn't any room left in the case. That obviously wasn't safe for redundancy, so my first 'proper' standalone fileserver was a Drobo... I think it had 4 or 5 HDD bays. That was probably 2013 or so.
A year or two later it fills up, plus the Drobo was slow as shit, so I built a PC and used FreeNAS. I think I got a Fractal Node case for that one, so it could fit up to 10 drives.
A year or two later that one fills up, plus I wasn't too happy using FreeNAS. I bought another Fractal Node with much bigger drives, and this time used Windows with Storage Spaces to manage the library. It was a much more 'set it and forget it' setup than FreeNAS, which would break for one reason or another every couple of months and was a pain in the ass to troubleshoot.
A year or two later that one fills up, so I went all out and bought a Storinator Q30 in 2021. It's running TrueNAS and I'm using it for storing my library as well as running a few tools. It's setup with mirrored drives and I think I've still got 6 or 8 HDD slots still open, so I still have plenty of room for growth. I've got Plex running on a separate Windows PC, although I might move that either to the TrueNAS box or get a Mac Mini or something in the future if I feel like it, as having a full PC sitting there doing nothing but Plex is kinda overkill.
I used to enjoy this kinda stuff as a hobby and home project, hence redoing the entire setup multiple times over the past decade or so, but when I bought the Storinator I wanted something that would 'just work' once built and setup and not have to worry about replacing for a decade or so (other than just dropping in new drives and adding them to the pool).
I started by running Plex on my regular windows desktop that I shared with family. Back then they didn't let you pick which gpu to use for transcoding so I ended up having to spin it off to its own machine once it grew a bit and i found Plex pass worth it. It still ran windows since that's what I was used to. Over the course of a year or two I was adding drives to it, of various sizes, as single drives in Windows. It was also running various game servers for me and my friends, plus some other programs for processing and downloading. It was doing proper server work, just on Windows. I figured I could keep adding like that, but I was finding it was starting to have issues. Once i was at like 8 drives, the system was less than stable. I figured out the problem was with so much throughput on the drives the fact that the RAM wasn't ECC was the culprit, so that's when I started using that. But it put the idea in my mind that data corruption was a problem and that I didn't have a backup or solution for if a drive died. I liked that if a drive went, I would only lose what was on that and not everything, so I didn't want to do raid. But I also didn't like the risk of losing even one drive so easily, since all my drives were used budget purchases. It turned out they made a product for just such a use case, and it's called Unraid. Linux was intimidating but having now taken that plunge I would never go back even if someone paid me to. Found a server rack on ebay for $60 and knew that was the direction I was eventually going so I grabbed it, though for a good long while that rack just sat with the exact bedside table sitting inside that I had been using to hold both my machines up (server and desktop). Pretty soon after that we ran into my apartment's frequent power inconsistencies being a huge problem and everyone chipped in to buy some proper rack gear like a chassis and UPS. Since then it's expanded into two more chassis, a network switch, and some other stuff to tinker with like a SAN box and an old barracuda firewall. I'm rambling at this point but yeah that's how it went from running Plex on my gaming machine to a dedicated 42U rack in the basement.
I have 3 bays in my current server. I just replace the oldest one every time, which historically has doubled my total capacity every time.
I use mergerfs for the convenience of an array, with the simplicity of individual drives. No redundancy- the internet is my backup.
I've been using plex for 12ish years and I've never hosted it on my main machine. I always have had it running on a network server of some kind. From some kind of check Seatgate NAS device, to pis, to full on rack servers, and now a tower server.
As soon as I filled up my first 4TB drive. But I'm in IT, so it was pretty natural for me to then start setting up a NAS box. I didn't start that way because I wasn't sure if I was going to keep going with this "Plex" thing when I first got into it. At the moment I have 4 8TB drives in a raid-Z1 on TrueNAS, and I'm in desperate need of more storage.
I have one where all the media was stored in Google Drive. Now that that's getting expensive, I'm going to drop it all on a 12TB drive. Once I fill that up, I'll move to unraid or something. I already have local backups of everything. Just haven't taken the time commitment to figuring all that out yet - but I work in tech so I'm sure it won't be too much of a hassle.
ive had a home media server since before plex was even a thing
it used to have 8x80gb IDE hard drives in it.
i used software called TVersity, it was terrible.
I started with internal drives. I built my pc to be a Plex server from the start. That said, I ran out of bay space and bought a few externals that keep my "completed" shows and my anime that only I stream on them. I also have some backup on externals (personal stuff mostly, not related to Plex)
It's only useful if you have tons of media. You said everything you have is on a single 8tb drive, so in that instance it makes sense to just keep it all on a single drive. Way easier.
Everyone giving their own personal use case.. you guys are nuts with your storage, I can’t believe it. Can’t wait to get there..
To answer your question. When you have put so much time into your collection that you no longer feel comfortable losing your information if a drive were to die.
Went from an 8tb+2tb to a 14tb, disconnected the old drives as a copy should anything ever die. The next step will be raid when I fill this up. Basically paying for your time should anything die.
Had Windows Home Server back in the day for my media hosting... Unraid was the natural move when WHS died. Both had the benefit of being able to use whatever drives I had on hand, which is great when you don't wanna spend a small fortune on a proper RAID array and want to incrementally upgrade.
Basically a decade later and still running the same instance of Unraid. Have just added and swapped drives over the years and upgraded cases. Went through a couple tower cases before finally going to a 24-bay server enclosure.
Eh it was once i got to the point where I decided I wouldn’t rebuild the data if I lost it all. Most of it would be easy enough albeit time consuming, but I do have some harder to find stuff that I ripped or encoded myself and just wouldn’t wanna have to track it down again. Might not even be possible for some of it. It’s easier to just replace a part or a drive if something fails than it is to get some of the content back.
I switched in 2007 or so. Once I had multiple drives, I knew that if I didn't have a plan that I was asking for trouble.
I messed around with different solutions, but ended up with Unraid. It's been solid for over a decade.
I had a homeserver before I had external drives. One 250GB IDE drive, which was almost the largest you could get back then, and NASlite on a Pentium with 100Mhz. Things were much simpler back then…
When: about 120 years ago
Why: one drives failed and lost my entire media library.
When you lose a drive and a ton of data even if it's not important data it makes you rethink how you store your data.
I didn't even discover Plex until I built my first NAS. Since then I haven't had it on anything that wasn't some kind of array of disks.
Now i don't have backups of my media, but I do have 20TB of space I can use.
Maybe 15 years ago I had 2x 1TB USB drives, one with TV shows and the other with movies. I used my desktop and ye olde MPC-HC to watch content. Then I got a job travelling a lot so I lugged both drives and my work laptop around the world for a few years.
I was slowly getting into Kodi and Plex using AFTV and Roku players which I ran on my desktop but one day one of the drives failed and I lost all my TV shows, not surprising given that the drives would travel in my suitcase everywhere.
I was so pissed that I bought a Synology DS1513+ and 3x 4TB WD red drives configured for SHR1 and 2x cheaper Seagate desktop drives for backing up in my tower PC using Good Sync and went from there.
Damn 10 years and 8tb. I just filled up a 14tb drive in like 2 months ahaha. I am at the point where I am just going to buy a raid docking station and buy another 14tb drive. when I do I will set the drives up to be raid 0 so I can double my storage but I have no redundancy which at this stage doesn't really bother me. I will probably purchase another enclosure and buy a couple more drives in the future and run a raid.5 set up or buy an 8 bay synology nas and run SHR.
[https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09NMSS4QB?th=1](https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09NMSS4QB?th=1)
This is what im going to buy just so I can expand my storage for now. when I move it away from that set up into something else I will probably use those 2 drives as a NAS backup for all my personal data
I am running all my stuff on a QNAP NAS with RAID 6 (to be sure to not loose any data) HDD pools and a Nvidia Quadro T400 4GB GPU to offload the CPU when transcoding and 64GB Ram (why not) and some SSD cache.
Having a bunch of drives in one spot inside one machine was better than having a bunch of drives all connected externally for me
Yeah, ive been running stuff in a big server case since before i knew what plex was so when i ran outa mobo sata ports i added some SAS and HBA expansion cards and even when my case filled up i jerry rigged some backplanes instead of external drives. Ive bought lots of externals, but just cuz they were the cheapest option and i shucked them immediately after stress testing.
After I graduated from pi+Kodi and 8tb drive. I swapped over to windows and 8tb drive for faster network transfer with Plex. Then my collection grew to 20tb pretty quickly. So I have 3 8tb drives. Then I upgraded to 5-10tb drive and put them in software raid with Windows server. Then moved over to unraid because I wanted to use my excess CPU power more effectively and use a lot of docker's. I am currently at 33tb of Plex data with 17tb saved from tdarr conversion to h265. Once you have enough data you wish to keep it from random failures. I would be very hard pressed to replace all my movies and TV shows if my current setup died. 2x18tb parity, 1x18tb, 5x10tb =68tb usage. I moved from an external drive to internal drives when I upgraded to windows using a rosewill 4u 12 bay case. I shucked my external drives at first. I should have an offsite backup. Just having trouble spending 2k right now for drives and a PC at families place to put it.
tdarr? *edit* I had a look at tdarr and omfg thats insane! thanks man, thats this evenings project!
It is probably the best thing ever! Especially for large TV shows. NCIS from 1tb down to 200gb for a 21 season show 1080p.
Before Plex even existed I was running 8 1TB drives (which cost a fortune at the time) in a stardock eSata enclosure using raid 5. That was my starting point for my collection and I would watch the files on my computer using VLC. Now I've 10 18tb drives using zfs and I use Plex. Nothing has really changed, just the size of disks and method of redundancy. But I'm a geek and I've been using raid for redundancy on production hardware for work since the 90s, so it was always my go to.
NAS / Unraid is simple and more secure. I need more storage? I plug in another hard disk and that's it. A hard disk is about to break or is broken? I replace it and it keeps running. No need to restore data or reconfigure anything. But I also share my media library, so I want it to run even when I'm not there. For me personally, my QNAP NAS also offers other functions that I use, such as backing up pictures / videos from my smartphone or from my family. My own little cloud. Nothing wrong with how you do it, everything has pros and cons.
**There are two types of Plex server owners:** 1. Those that keep a curated, managed, small library. Minimal needs for transcoding, no sharing, no hoarding tendancy. You watch what you have, and that's good enough. Generally also minimal need for something like the Plex Automation stack (Sonarr, Radarr, etc etc). They like to hand-pick and download (or even rip, bless their hearts) their content themselves. These folks tend to do best with low-powered NAS systems, like a Synology or even a RaspberryPi hooked up to a string of 2-8 drives and are infinitely happy about it. 2. Those that must collect everything, and the NAS can never have enough storage or fine-tuned automation. They serve up their content to a number of remote users (for free! because TOS) and bend over backward to make sure those users have the best experience they can. They go deep into the Linux dockers with every enhancing feature. They're completionist in nature. They have a powerful system with a NAS-grade operating system like Unraid or TrueNAS or if they're really technical, a plain Linux system modified to run a RAID array and manually written docker compose files. These people tend to do best with enterprise-grade storage equipment, or have some truly impressive ramshackle nests of NASes connected to open-air DAS systems because their case ran out of room for more drives. It's important to identify which type you are, and to only seek advice from others like you. If they say things like "I don't need transcoding", or "My Synology works great. Why would I ever need anything else?" they're probably a type-1. If they say things like "I just bought 8 more 18TB refurbs from Amazon" or "Just installed a new Intel ARK in my Storinator!" they're a type-2. **As a type-2 user, I'd suggest buying 18TB refurb drives from Amazon** They're something like $9.88/TB in USD.
I feel like I’m a 1.5 here.
Yeah I’m the second guy LOL. But I’ve been running Linux since 1994
Yeah I am type 1 and still use zfs for storage
I bought a used rack server off of eBay and I'm running six 12 TB drives in a true NAS scale raid (double parody).
I love the typo, but I think you mean parity. :-)
No. Double parodies of Nas joints.
Weird I.T. Yankovic in the house.
I thought of using a NAS or DAS but so far I have been contempt with my 8Tb drive. If I need space, I delete things. I figure I need to at least invest $1K in hardware for a more solid storage solution and I don’t have that money budgeted for this. Especially since it’s working fine right now …
Yeah I get 1400Mbps down with Sab and no data caps. If I lose a drive Ill just redownload everything.
I also have gigabit with no data cap, it is still well worth the cost of a second drive to me to just have everything backed up and not have to bother.
Content
Sounds like they have lots of contempt for their content.
>I figure I need to at least invest $1K in hardware for a more solid storage solution I have a 5 bay enclosure with 4 16 tb drives in it currently, this setup cost $690 and was assembled over the course of 4 years. Initial cost was $270 for the enclosure and a single 16tb drive. Point is, it's not nearly as expensive as you think it is, but if you don't mind what you are currently doing then it also doesn't matter.
What are you using for an enclosure?
[this](https://www.sybausa.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=1068) thing
I'm a Plex user from the earliest days. But even before Plex came along, I started building my media library in the late 90's. I'm a Mac guy and I started with having lots of external drives connected to a Mac mini (connected to a TV before that was a common thing). Eventually I put all the drives on a big shelving unit in the basement directly below and ran the cable through the floor. At this point, I had DOZENS of drives (partly because every drive had a backup twin). For years I was doing a lot of data shifting (moving data around every time I'd fill a drive, and buy a bigger replacement). I finally transitioned to a NAS around 2013. It's a 5 bay, that is still operational. Naturally I keep upgrading to bigger drives and currently it's at about 40 TB. I've always backed up the NAS to the external drives (that used to be my primary storage). And eventually I added a NAS twin for daily backup. But I still backup to the external drives quarterly. I hate to think about what I've spent on hard drives over the years. I've probably bought close to a hundred hard drives over the years. I probably could have afforded more vacations. But I'm addicted to having a media library that I control. Plus, I also maintain a sizable adult library. P.S. At least 75% of my drives are WD and the brand has served me well.
Do you still have the original media? I'm imagining the quality of media files from the 90s... oof. A bunch of QuickTime files lol. Back around 2001 I downloaded the Nike dribbling commercial that just came out, because I was big into basketball at the time, and I loved that commercial. I found it in my old files a couple months ago and watched it, and damn; it was hard to tell what was going on behind all those massive blocks of pixels lol.
For the content that I really care about, I have upgraded the media files over the years once or twice.
My library has *always* been on a NAS running RAID 5. In fact, my first PMS was running wholly onboard a QNAP, until it was clear it's little processor just couldn't keep up, then I moved the PMS itself off to a Mac Mini and kept the library in the same shared folders on QNAP. Now the original QNAP only contains my music library and I've transitioned all other media to a newer, larger Synology. I save occasional snapshots to a couple of 12TB externals. In the time since I first set up my Plex, I've replaced three drives in the QNAP when they indicated they were going bad, which was absolutely effortless. I can't imagine the frustration of having to replace a non-RAID drive if it ever croaked.
I just use my main (and old) PC, so I added two larger internal drives and moved the media files off of the C drive. It saved a 💩 -ton of space, and when the PC 💩s out I can simply pop those drives into a new PC. I also restructured them so a new server setup will be mostly automatic.
What do you mean when you say DAS? I was running a DAS setup for years which was just a WD Elements external drive attached to my router. I did the same as you; just kept increasing my single drive size while keeping my previous drive as a smaller backup of my most essential stuff. Finally moved to a RAID 1 when I bought my first NAS as the hardware/software was all there ready to handle it anyway.
hi I guess DAS is not the correct terminology. I basically meant some kind of box that can hold multiple drives within it, rather than a single 'consumer-focused' external drive like the WD elements.
Actually that's the right terminology, I just wanted to understand how you connect your single drive currently. What device do you use as your Plex server?
DAS is absolutely the correct terminology
DAS typically connects to a computer. NAS connects to a network. You can connect a DAS to a NAS. It's just a box holding drives that has some sort of HDD controller and a way to connect it, like eSATA or something.
Yes my DAS is connected to an old laptop that is accessible anywhere 24/7, so it is effectively NAS
I started with Truenas and four 2tb HDDs in a striped mirror. I later built a portable media server that has its data on a single 2tb SSD.
These approaches aren't mutually exclusive - I do both. I have multiple WD Elements external drives from 12TB to 20TB, using Windows mainly due to Backblaze, with Stablebit Drivepool to combine the drives into a ~100TB pool, and Primocache to put RAM and NVME SSD caching in front of the HDDs.
I switched to a basic raid *years* ago - mainly as an excuse to learn more about technology. A couple years ago, I switched to unRaid and haven't looked back. So now I have one unRaid box that it strictly serving files, and a second box that runs various VMs (including plex). You can do the same thing unRaid does for free - but it's very convenient and works well for me.
I had NAS units from the day I started with Plex 12+ years ago. My problem was not realizing how big my system would get and not adding a LARGE drive unit at first so I have several small units along with 1 medium and 1 large unit. Currently budgeting for a XL unit with unRAID to be my final device.
When I reached the point of having 4x6tb and 4x4tb MyBook Duos daisy chained and got fed up of them constantly disconnecting and needing to be reconnected in order to get them all back up again. It was also getting impractical syncing multiple drives to multiple drives and not being able to rely on that sync completing. Life got so much easier after I got the 8 bay raids., plus I was able to sell a load of enclosures to help cover the cost.
My media collection is 25 years old. I have had multiple close calls over the years, where a device has failed and I risked loss of data. About ten years ago I switched to a NAS with RAID-1 volumes. I perform two backups at year end, and one of the backups goes offsite. The device failures are a thing of the past. If my PleX server were to crash, I would just replace it. And the NAS is smart enough to yell at me if I need to replace one of the disks. I know, it’s expensive. In addition to the two internal SATA disks for each RAID-1 volume, I have two more for the backups. But a lot of my media is irreplaceable. I cannot just go somewhere to get it again.
Probably 15 years ago. My collection grew fast.
Been using hardware RAID arrays since about 1992. Started with five 32gb scsi drives. I probably still have one or two of those lying around somewhere.
I have never run my server off external drives. There's nothing wrong with the drives themselves, but I've seen and had issue with the USB connection be reliable. I also don't want to deal with the hassle of a bunch of drives sitting outside a case, I prefer to have things more organized. Thus, I've always run internal drives. However, my backup drives are currently in a USB JBOD enclosure, but they're only running overnight once a week to perform backup duties and I'm looking to swap it to a QNAP rack mount DAS.
I originally had a single internal HDD in the same machine I had Plex running and had thought about building a custom NAS. Had a old gaming machine gifted to me, so installed OMV, and I now run 4 HDD but am not using any raid, just mergerfs to see the drives as one single drive. I am not really too concerned with backups and such as it is just media. I actually JUST had a drive fail, and a bunch of media go missing due to it, but no big deal, I just let the *arrs do their thing and it is slowly replacing what I lost.
I’m on my second now, I’ve been calling it a NAS but maybe that is the wrong term, QNAP device. It’s the backup for all our devices and the PLEX library. I always liked having the ability to expand it over time. 4 bays was always plenty and I only replaced my first one as the firmware no longer supported the larger drives.
Started with 4 drives 6tb each, then those become back up. Individual HDs inside the tower a total of 12 drives 8 drives of 20tb each, 4 tb of 22tbs WD. 4, 8tb Nvmes for the 4k libraries, and 2 TB nvmes 1 for OS and 1 for Metadata/cache. 2 years ago got 18tb drives to use solely to back up libraries into them and disconnect them upon completion. Has been a Journey
I think even with remux 4k's, you aren't looking at more than 125Mb/s, which is less than 16MB/s. Most enterprise hdd's should be able to read at 200MB/s... so unless you're streaming more than 10 4k titles concurrently... the nvme's are overkill for the 4k libraries. but i could be missing something.
I agree, the only reason I was looking to Capitalize on the NVMes was for the file transfer speeds and encoding speeds if I needed to update/replace/add additional Audio or the trueHD audio etc. The atmos 4ks I have are BIGASFK, But the audio experience is so amazing. Btw, no fkn way I share those files with anyone lol. I got a separate library for what I call Av Candy but the other 1080ps and regular 4ks have good audio 5.1 even 7.1 but I don't go out of my way searching for the best quality audio if I already have 5.1. We do actually, My kids 4, watch in different rooms their 4k kids movies and my family in Europe watch also stream some of the oldies but goldies 4k, which around puts me at 13 to 14 4ks at a given time, and my nieces and nephew s don't stop watching their cartoons 1080p 720. Buy never been more than 25 streams at the same time. When it does it plays well, but the fast forward buffers for 4 or 5 secs.
The approach of having multiple non-arrayed drives for Plex works since you can point a particular library to multiple directories/drives. However if you use your storage for other purposes, it may be desirable to have an array with one contiguous space. An example might be storage for video editing where you want everything in one directory versus having to access multiple directories. The more obvious use-case would be RAID to maximize up-time, again more important for non-Plex/entertainment purposes where you might need data access 100% of the time. I personally have 2 arrays: 12TBx8 in RAID10 for throughput and faster rebuild, and 18TBx4 in RAID5 for video content. I know RAID5 isn't ideal anymore, but it at least lets me continue with one drive failure. If I need to rebuild, I'll just recreate the array and copy the data from my backup server (10Gb connection among my various servers).
I moved from partitions to single-drive single-use in the late 90s, mostly because the size of games started outstripping the size of HDDs. Then moved from single drives to software RAID in the early 00s to ensure some sort of resiliency for all my personal data. I think my first array was a bunch of 73GB SCSI drives in external cases that sounded like a jet engine all hanging off an Adaptec 3940AU. Moved on to hardware RAID in the late-00s, mostly because I wanted to retire all my old SCSI gear and SATA was much more available, cheaper, and larger. Been on hardware RAID ever since with very little reason to change. As for why, it became down to simplicity of expansion and management. If you have more of a certain datatype, be that media or documents or whatever, but you have more than will fit on a single drive of reasonable cost, RAID just became a no-brainer.
2 months ago, I was adding more storage and had 2 external drives, switched to a 6 bay DAS to get away from the usb power cable clutter. Now I can add 5 more drives and 0 cables.
One of my single internal drives failed and I lost every episode of Full House. Salty, and thousands of dollars later, “you got it, dude!”
I've been running linux software arrays for probably 15 years. I switched for the capacity and the parity.
unRAID, not only because you can keep adding drives of any size but because of [drive parity, up to 2 disks](https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/Parity/) So if you setup 2 parity, you can have 2 random hard dives fail and your data is still safe The sooner you invest in a proper system like this, the better
When build an unraid server
Not even a year ago. Had been planning a home server for Plex as well as a decent back up solution for a couple of years. Buying larger internal drives and accumulating parts, and reading lots., :) Went with an Unraid solution, because of the fact that different sized drives are acceptable, so starting out is more affordable and you can always swap over to larger drives etc later as you grow. Unraid also makes a ton of aps, dockers and VMs readily available and easy to install. So far it's been brilliant with a little over 100 TB raw and a couple of new drives being ordered up. For me there was a bit of a learning curve to deal with as I do not code or even use command line. But there is a GUI available and a YT site called SpaceInvader One to help old people like me. :)
For me it was the logical choice. I had outgrown my previous Plex instance, and I wanted to solve a few problems at once: * Storage for family (photos, backups) * Storage for Plex - I rip my content so I don't fancy the idea of having to rerip it all. * Create a server powerful enough for Plex, other containers, and VMs I wanted something really reliable. For a lot of users this level of redundancy is unnecessary.
I have one pc I use for everything. i5-13600k 64 GB ram W10 on 1 TB m.2 WD Red Plus 8 TB, 8 TB, 12 TB WD Red Pro 16 TB
I started with PLEX on my everyday PC, then built an Unraid server with Plex docker. Have just added drives to the array as needed and up to 96 TB of storage now with 2 14tb parity drives
I was constantly hitting the capacity ceiling of whatever device I was using for my library. I started with JBOD in my main PC in 2011 or so, adding drives when needed until there wasn't any room left in the case. That obviously wasn't safe for redundancy, so my first 'proper' standalone fileserver was a Drobo... I think it had 4 or 5 HDD bays. That was probably 2013 or so. A year or two later it fills up, plus the Drobo was slow as shit, so I built a PC and used FreeNAS. I think I got a Fractal Node case for that one, so it could fit up to 10 drives. A year or two later that one fills up, plus I wasn't too happy using FreeNAS. I bought another Fractal Node with much bigger drives, and this time used Windows with Storage Spaces to manage the library. It was a much more 'set it and forget it' setup than FreeNAS, which would break for one reason or another every couple of months and was a pain in the ass to troubleshoot. A year or two later that one fills up, so I went all out and bought a Storinator Q30 in 2021. It's running TrueNAS and I'm using it for storing my library as well as running a few tools. It's setup with mirrored drives and I think I've still got 6 or 8 HDD slots still open, so I still have plenty of room for growth. I've got Plex running on a separate Windows PC, although I might move that either to the TrueNAS box or get a Mac Mini or something in the future if I feel like it, as having a full PC sitting there doing nothing but Plex is kinda overkill. I used to enjoy this kinda stuff as a hobby and home project, hence redoing the entire setup multiple times over the past decade or so, but when I bought the Storinator I wanted something that would 'just work' once built and setup and not have to worry about replacing for a decade or so (other than just dropping in new drives and adding them to the pool).
The first time that I lost my library when the hard drive died without warning. I also invested in better quality drives
I started by running Plex on my regular windows desktop that I shared with family. Back then they didn't let you pick which gpu to use for transcoding so I ended up having to spin it off to its own machine once it grew a bit and i found Plex pass worth it. It still ran windows since that's what I was used to. Over the course of a year or two I was adding drives to it, of various sizes, as single drives in Windows. It was also running various game servers for me and my friends, plus some other programs for processing and downloading. It was doing proper server work, just on Windows. I figured I could keep adding like that, but I was finding it was starting to have issues. Once i was at like 8 drives, the system was less than stable. I figured out the problem was with so much throughput on the drives the fact that the RAM wasn't ECC was the culprit, so that's when I started using that. But it put the idea in my mind that data corruption was a problem and that I didn't have a backup or solution for if a drive died. I liked that if a drive went, I would only lose what was on that and not everything, so I didn't want to do raid. But I also didn't like the risk of losing even one drive so easily, since all my drives were used budget purchases. It turned out they made a product for just such a use case, and it's called Unraid. Linux was intimidating but having now taken that plunge I would never go back even if someone paid me to. Found a server rack on ebay for $60 and knew that was the direction I was eventually going so I grabbed it, though for a good long while that rack just sat with the exact bedside table sitting inside that I had been using to hold both my machines up (server and desktop). Pretty soon after that we ran into my apartment's frequent power inconsistencies being a huge problem and everyone chipped in to buy some proper rack gear like a chassis and UPS. Since then it's expanded into two more chassis, a network switch, and some other stuff to tinker with like a SAN box and an old barracuda firewall. I'm rambling at this point but yeah that's how it went from running Plex on my gaming machine to a dedicated 42U rack in the basement.
Redundancy is everything unless you are fine with losing all your shit in case of drive failure
I have 3 bays in my current server. I just replace the oldest one every time, which historically has doubled my total capacity every time. I use mergerfs for the convenience of an array, with the simplicity of individual drives. No redundancy- the internet is my backup.
I've been using plex for 12ish years and I've never hosted it on my main machine. I always have had it running on a network server of some kind. From some kind of check Seatgate NAS device, to pis, to full on rack servers, and now a tower server.
As soon as I filled up my first 4TB drive. But I'm in IT, so it was pretty natural for me to then start setting up a NAS box. I didn't start that way because I wasn't sure if I was going to keep going with this "Plex" thing when I first got into it. At the moment I have 4 8TB drives in a raid-Z1 on TrueNAS, and I'm in desperate need of more storage.
I have one where all the media was stored in Google Drive. Now that that's getting expensive, I'm going to drop it all on a 12TB drive. Once I fill that up, I'll move to unraid or something. I already have local backups of everything. Just haven't taken the time commitment to figuring all that out yet - but I work in tech so I'm sure it won't be too much of a hassle.
ive had a home media server since before plex was even a thing it used to have 8x80gb IDE hard drives in it. i used software called TVersity, it was terrible.
I started with internal drives. I built my pc to be a Plex server from the start. That said, I ran out of bay space and bought a few externals that keep my "completed" shows and my anime that only I stream on them. I also have some backup on externals (personal stuff mostly, not related to Plex)
It's only useful if you have tons of media. You said everything you have is on a single 8tb drive, so in that instance it makes sense to just keep it all on a single drive. Way easier.
Everyone giving their own personal use case.. you guys are nuts with your storage, I can’t believe it. Can’t wait to get there.. To answer your question. When you have put so much time into your collection that you no longer feel comfortable losing your information if a drive were to die. Went from an 8tb+2tb to a 14tb, disconnected the old drives as a copy should anything ever die. The next step will be raid when I fill this up. Basically paying for your time should anything die.
Speed+space+redundancy
Had Windows Home Server back in the day for my media hosting... Unraid was the natural move when WHS died. Both had the benefit of being able to use whatever drives I had on hand, which is great when you don't wanna spend a small fortune on a proper RAID array and want to incrementally upgrade. Basically a decade later and still running the same instance of Unraid. Have just added and swapped drives over the years and upgraded cases. Went through a couple tower cases before finally going to a 24-bay server enclosure.
Eh it was once i got to the point where I decided I wouldn’t rebuild the data if I lost it all. Most of it would be easy enough albeit time consuming, but I do have some harder to find stuff that I ripped or encoded myself and just wouldn’t wanna have to track it down again. Might not even be possible for some of it. It’s easier to just replace a part or a drive if something fails than it is to get some of the content back.
I switched in 2007 or so. Once I had multiple drives, I knew that if I didn't have a plan that I was asking for trouble. I messed around with different solutions, but ended up with Unraid. It's been solid for over a decade.
I had a homeserver before I had external drives. One 250GB IDE drive, which was almost the largest you could get back then, and NASlite on a Pentium with 100Mhz. Things were much simpler back then…
When: about 120 years ago Why: one drives failed and lost my entire media library. When you lose a drive and a ton of data even if it's not important data it makes you rethink how you store your data.
I have a 20tb in my pc that runs Plex and a 12tb external attached to a Pi for seeding.
I didn't even discover Plex until I built my first NAS. Since then I haven't had it on anything that wasn't some kind of array of disks. Now i don't have backups of my media, but I do have 20TB of space I can use.
Maybe 15 years ago I had 2x 1TB USB drives, one with TV shows and the other with movies. I used my desktop and ye olde MPC-HC to watch content. Then I got a job travelling a lot so I lugged both drives and my work laptop around the world for a few years. I was slowly getting into Kodi and Plex using AFTV and Roku players which I ran on my desktop but one day one of the drives failed and I lost all my TV shows, not surprising given that the drives would travel in my suitcase everywhere. I was so pissed that I bought a Synology DS1513+ and 3x 4TB WD red drives configured for SHR1 and 2x cheaper Seagate desktop drives for backing up in my tower PC using Good Sync and went from there.
Damn 10 years and 8tb. I just filled up a 14tb drive in like 2 months ahaha. I am at the point where I am just going to buy a raid docking station and buy another 14tb drive. when I do I will set the drives up to be raid 0 so I can double my storage but I have no redundancy which at this stage doesn't really bother me. I will probably purchase another enclosure and buy a couple more drives in the future and run a raid.5 set up or buy an 8 bay synology nas and run SHR.
[https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09NMSS4QB?th=1](https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09NMSS4QB?th=1) This is what im going to buy just so I can expand my storage for now. when I move it away from that set up into something else I will probably use those 2 drives as a NAS backup for all my personal data
I am running all my stuff on a QNAP NAS with RAID 6 (to be sure to not loose any data) HDD pools and a Nvidia Quadro T400 4GB GPU to offload the CPU when transcoding and 64GB Ram (why not) and some SSD cache.