Best hard drives / set up for Plex

General Discussions Plex Features
,
1

Hi, new to the forum. We discovered Plex about 6 months ago and quickly realized how much better it was than the native iOS apps on apple TV for streaming our personal movie collection. We have two ancient G-Drives (10+ years old) hooked up to our 2015 Mac desktop, and have Plex media server installed on our Mac. The drives have performed wonderfully under the circumstances, but they eject on their own without warning and I have a bad feeling that their days are numbered.

So, we’re in the market for some new hard drives and considering either new G-Drives, or the Western Digital line of drives that Plex seems to advertise for using with its media server. I recently found out that WD owns G-Drive as well. Would be looking for around 8 TB of storage.

  1. Is there any advantage/what advantages are there to using the Western Digital drives that are promoted as working with Plex? Is the media server then installed on the drive instead of on my Mac? Is there any advantage to that? We primarily stream either at home in the house off of WIFI, or at a weekend home using LTE cell signal by hooking up an iPad with Plex installed to the tv using the Apple lightning to hdmi cable.

  2. We used to keep everything backed up onto other G-Drives, but have had the backup drives in the closet for years. (At one point we had 6 G-drives daisy chained together over firewire). Is there a way to “partition” a larger drive into two sections that look identical so that we have backups of everything, in case of failure, without having to get multiple drives?

  3. I guess my main question is what is the advantage of the Western Digital drives, and why do they hammer the point home about Plex? We’ve been very happy with the G-Drives, but knowing they’re owned by the same company gives me some peace of mind about the quality and if they would better suit our 2018 needs than the G-Drives did when we bought them in 2007, then that would be a good fit.

  4. My husband works at an office on a PC and might eventually see a need to be able to save documents to our home drive remotely. Do the Western Digitals make that easier? We are fairly tech-savvy but have not jumped on the Google Drive/Drop Box bandwagon.

Thanks very much,
Emily

2

Be prepared for no less than 10,000 differing opinions. Here’s mine:

I prefer a component setup, meaning that my Server is a Windows 10 PC, and my files are located on a few different Network Attached Storage devices or NAS, as many prefer to call them. Your G-Drives will fall into this category.

The Western Digital drives fall into the NAS category, with a bit of a twist. The reason you might see Plex and WD attached in advertisements is that the WD drives are capable of running the Plex Server software, eliminating the need for a separate PC or other or Mac. There are many NAS solutions available that can do this.

From what I understand (I have no experience here) is that running Plex on a WD is about the second worst experience available, second only to running Plex on a router.

Now, using WD as a strictly NAS solution (hosting the files only) is a viable solution. I do this myself for the photos and music sections of my library. I prefer a pretty hefty Drobo (another NAS solution that can run Plex, but I don’t use it that way) to handle the video media.

So, if you’re just entertaining WD for storing and accessing the files alone, I think you’d be fine. The best piece of advice I’ve read around here is to buy twice as much storage as you think you’ll need. You will eventually grow into it. Based on that, I’d start looking into other types of storage with at least 5 bays available. This allows you to slap in almost any size drive you like into the bays, expanding as necessary.

Just my thoughts.

3

For cloud file sharing… There’s Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox. They all pretty much do the same things, with some unique features to each. Several NAS drives offer features that allow remote access to files.

If you’re just talking about Word docs, pictures, and such, I recommend using one of the cloud services, and skip the NAS features as they often grow outdated and unsupported as time goes by.