I have a plex server running on a home built workstation. I started off with two Ironwolf 12TB drives in a dynamic spanned volume. I ran out of space. I added another 12TB Ironwolf to the system but cannot get it to add to the volume. I get an error saying “The volume cannot be extended because the number of clusters will exceed the maximum number of clusters supported by the file system”.
Have you experienced this before and know how to overcome it?
Another question - when you get into multiple TB like this, what is the BEST way to setup storage? I do not have a mirror or raid right now (but do have backblaze setup) … and I am willing to consider “starting over” with storage if the long term outcome is better.
It’s hard to know for sure, but I bet I will end up with at least 50-100TB when all is said and done, and maybe more.
I use built an Unraid NAS Server. It costs a few bucks but you can add up to 30 drives that is 28 data and two parity. Unraid also supports docker containers and VMs. The great thing about this is that you can mix and match drive sizes and add new drives as you need more space. You just need to make sure that your biggest drive is the parity drive meaning that you cannot have a data drive that is bigger than the parity drive. This will also provide you with redundancy on your data so if you have a drive fail, you just replace the bad drive with the same or greater size and the system will rebuild the data on that drive.
Thanks for the reply! I have heard people talking about unraid but haven’t looked into it. I went and watched a couple videos when I saw your reply but don’t quite yet have a grasp of how I would get from where I am now to there. Right now I have my Windows 10 machine that I do all my ripping and encoding on, that is also my Plex server, and my storage on internal drives. If you were me, how would you go about implementing unraid, if I were to go that route? I am worried about making a mistake and torching my data. FYI, I have an M.2 drive that is my boot drive, and the two Ironwolf 12TB drives are in a spanned volume as the D drive for ONLY storing MKV/M4V files.
Would you try to migrate what I have now to unraid, or setup a whole new machine just for it? For what it’s worth I think I have a stack of rack mount servers at the office not being used. I would need to see if I have something that would work but I could potentially go that route if better. Thoughts?
I have heard of minitool also. Between these two what is your opinion or preference? I assume they do the same thing … (assuming I try to stay with what I have now)
you really should avoid spanned or raid 0 arrays, if you lose one drive you can lose all your data.
you are far better off just using them as separate drives, plex can have multiple paths for a library, ie d:\movies and e:\movies
as far as storage, welcome to the world of media collection, you should definitely engage google and learn what you can about storage, as there are many different paths, with a wide variety of time, money, and effort commitment levels.
I’ve never used it, but seems many well praised, drive pool works in windows and you can simply keep adding internal or external drives to your current system.
if you know or can learn linux, you can build yourself a ubuntu or debian box and use linux built in raid systems.
unraid or freenas or some other linux based distros can simplify some things for you, but not all are free, or have their own limitations.
synology and qnap make a wide variety of dedicated NAS units, some with even the power to run plex server directly on the nas (so you don’t have to run your pc 24/7).
The unraid OS is stored on a USB drive so you will want a good one. Unraid does not require a lot of power so if you have an old server or computer laying around that will load the OS your off to a good start. Since you are using your two 12tb drives currently, you would need to get enough new drives to cover what you need to get off of the 2 drives. This can be any combination of drive sizes but remember that a data drive can not be greater in size then the parity drive. Once you moved all your data off of your 12tb drives you can add them to your array one probably replacing the parity drive and let it rebuild. Then you can add the other 12tb as a data drive as well as the parity drive that you were using if you want.
Good point about just adding another library / drive. I’ll prob do that as a stop gap measure.
As for all other solutions I think one of my biggest concerns at this point is power consumption. I read earlier that a rack mount server might consume $60+ per month in power. That makes me think “surely I could figure out a way to use cloud storage cheaper” (assuming that idea would actually stream/work and I could find large size limits, which could prove difficult).
I run the PC all the time anyway, because it’s usually crunching files, so staying on one machine probably makes the most sense.
I need to do some more research about unraid but I think I could run my windows instance and the storage at the same time.
After reading, thinking, and talking to a friend, I decided to buy DrivePool and start there.
I have two 12TB IronWolf drives in my machine now that are in a spanned volume. I added a 3rd drive and let that be the FIRST drive in my new DrivePool. Tomorrow I am going to buy another 12TB Ironwolf and add to the drive pool. Then I will move everything off the spanned volume, pull the drives out of the spanned volume, and add to the drive pool as separate drives. From there I can set which files should be duplicated for redundancy (which will likely only be ones I have encoded from MKV to M4V) and I will leave everything else the way it is. If I lost them I have everything backing up to BackBlaze and could re-download it from there.
Then, I am thinking about (at the friend’s suggestion) adding an external 4 bay drive caddy. I can then continue to add drives there to expand storage without having to build a NAS and have something else to manage.
Thanks. I didn’t plan to move that one. Just the video files.
I actually bought TWO 12TB Ironwolf drives and a 2 bay external drive caddy. I am currently copying over all the files from the two drives in the spanned volume and when done I will format and put them in DrivePool as single drives.
Question - I had a different friend tell me I shouldn’t use drive pool and should instead use Windows storage spaces. Any thoughts on that - pros/cons?
I personally use DrivePool + SnapRAID and can vouch for its performance (two pools, one is 20TB across 6 drives for media storage, then another 3TB pool with an SSD as a write-cache for encoding/media work). I found Storage Spaces to be a bit clunky, but that was a few years ago. When I last looked into it, DrivePool managed the disks/pooling much better, while Storage Spaces offered better parity options. Performance was iffy with parity options back then and so I opted for DrivePool + SnapRAID and it has worked well.
If MS has fixed/improved upon the parity speed issues, using an OS-native product might be better, but otherwise DrivePool is excellent, the devs maintain it, and it has an active user base.
