I just got started with PLEX, and I like what I see very much. I purchased a refurbish Dell desktop with i5 processor, 4 Gb RAM and a 1Tb of internal hard drive. Alreday it looks like I may soon need more storage. My question, perhaps foolish, is this: does it make any significant difference whether I add an additional internal hard drive or an external hard drive? Will the external drive be too slow?
Thanks for your reply.
IMHO as long as you can add drives internally (enough room and power and SATA connectors), prefer them over external drives.
They’re better protected that way. Internal drives are usually more performant as well.
Did the exact same thing myself. Tried external HD and was a headache, didn’t work well at all. Bought a 4 TB internal HD on amazon and its been awesome. Def recommend internal! BTW I didn’t have another SATA cord so I cloned my 1TB to the 4TB and switched them out.
I have an unpurposed external 3 Tb hard drive which would be an easy solution . . . if it would work. My dedicated media server PC is an i5, but its USB ports are all 2.0, not 3.0.
You indicated likely problems trying to stream 17 Gb MKV videos to PLEX from an external drive. I suspect this means it would be impossible to get suitable performance through a USB 2.0 port.
I am trying to avoid the need tominstall a second internal hard drive, only because it might be difficult to put it into a Dell Optiplex 3010, which seems rather smallish.
Thoughts?
The data rate of a USB 2.0 port (480 Mbps) is absolutely sufficient for streaming of several movies in parallel.
Just don’t move the location of the Plex data folder onto this drive.
I have my Plex data on the C-Drive, where everything works well. Unfortunately, itbhas only 1 Tb capacity and Imam running out of space. I have another 2 Tb data to add, nearly all of which will be videos in the MKV format, approximately 15 - 25 GB per file.
Yes, I could install a second internal hard drive with 3 or 4 additional Tbs, which would give me a C-drive with 1 Tb and a D-drive with 4 Tb. All my photos, and music files, and some of my “Other Videos” would be on the C-drive. I would put these additional 20 Gb each MKV files on the internal D-drive.
But then, I could put them on an external D-drive connecting through the USB 2.0 port.
So, you seem to be saying the USB 2.0 port is adequate, but that I should not put ANY video files on the external D-drive. Or are you saying: “Just don’t try to store all media files, the entire Plex folder, on an external drive?
JAM
No I mean the folder with all the data which your Plex server uses internally. If you haven’t heard about it yet, don’t think about it anymore.
Just make sure that your C: drive is never getting totally filled up.
I would only put some media files on any D-drive—whether internal or external. Then I would create a link to these file in the “find media files” function. Nothing important would be located on the D-drive—no operating system, nor the master Plex data file. And all the photo media files and music media files would be on the D-drive.
Am I going to be OK?
JAM
I’d use the external hard drive only for the bigger files, like movies and tv shows.
When it comes to many small(er) files (i.e. photos & music), I’d rather use the fastest hard drive available – and that is the internal one.
Perfect. Thank you for all your counsel.
JAM
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