Can anyone recommend any good hard drives for storing movies and tv shows to be played and streamed with Plex? Or point me to good review articles? Thanks.
still the same source: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q3-2016/
just thought i would add my problems with seagates, i had 4 installed over 7 months (there abouts) and all of them failed at 24 months of age, it was pretty incredible i could actually say when the last 2 would die almost to the day. These were the 3tb barracuda drives sourced at different times from amazon, personally i would never touch another seagate as the failure rates for their drives has been terrible for me. WD on the other hand seem to run and run. Read what you will but i feel they are designed to fail - or seagate has some sort of serious problem with their hardware.
The BB test is shady - it’s not really a benchmark. Take it for what it’s worth. They have many motives for their results.
A little Google will answer your own question.
FWIW I started using WD Green drives about 10 years ago and have yet to have one fail. I have around 60 in operation among various sites. That’s not to say they are the best… it’s just my experience.
I use WD Red drives in my NAS and Green drives for my backup. No complains here and no issues.
Also a WD Red user, they work well
I’ve always had good luck with Western Digital and HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) drives.
WDMyCloud single drive units are good cheap drives to store your media on. Can attached another drive for backup of all your data. Has gigabit ethernet for fast data transfers. Can auto backup your other files like pictures you take on your phone so you will never lose them if your phone breaks or is stolen. It’s a great little device. It’s slow to back up files but it’s fast enough to play a couple streams at once.
WD…HGST…Samsung…all good drives. 5400 RPM drives perform well for video playback and run cooler than 7200 RPM drives. Just stay away from “archive” drives if you plan to write often, as their shingled layout brings unique issues.
Thanks guys! Much appreciated.
What interests me most of all is how these drives perform specifically for Plex use, i.e. streaming and storing media with large file sizes. I’m less interested in how they work for backups and data.
Also: Do different hard drive brands work together well, or is it advisable to only use one sort for a Plex server?
@aeonx said:
What interests me most of all is how these drives perform specifically for Plex use, i.e. streaming and storing media with large file sizes. I’m less interested in how they work for backups and data.
I’m no drive expert, but the reason I went with the more expensive WD Red drives (not Red Pro, which are even more expensive) is because they had great reviews for continuous and consistent 24/7 operation. I don’t need drives with the fastest read, as I would with video editing (a former career). My entire collection is made up of Blu-Ray Rips, so I was looking for drives with enough throughput for a few Direct Play streams and a handful transcoded streams.
Also: Do different hard drive brands work together well, or is it advisable to only use one sort for a Plex server?
I think you will find varying opinions on this. What I have learned points me to using the same brand and model, but (ideally) sourced from different manufacturing lots. This is to ensure consistent performance by matching spindle speed and reducing the likelihood of multiple drives failing at once. I’m not an expert on this, but it is the advice I’ve heard from multiple sources.
Just and an FYI, 99.9% of all hard drives on the market to day are MORE than fast enough, typically running in the 3+ gbps but you are almost ALWAYS going to be limited by your network 1gbps (110 MBps typically).
Further, a 30GB bluray rip only needs ~4 to 5 MBps to Direct Play… So, speed (for Plex) is not an issue… If Plex is the needed issue, then I would go with something Raided 0/1/5/10 for redundancy issues. Your biggest concern is protecting the data from drive failures, not how fast the drive is.
@aeonx said:
Can anyone recommend any good hard drives for storing movies and tv shows to be played and streamed with Plex? Or point me to good review articles? Thanks.
You are going to get a LONG list of ideas. Despite the forum response I have been a LOYAL follower and user for Seagate NEVER had a problem with any seagate drive longer than 24 mos or not. I have had good luck with pretty much all major brands, like Western Digital and Hitachi as well… Seagate is my preference however.
WD makes black and blue drives (don’t get the green they are far inferior to most drives). So WD or seagate is what I would recommend.
7200 RPM SATA 3, and you don’t need hybrid (ram cache drives) a waste of money… basic SATA is all you need for Plex. I change my library \ apps to be on SSD drive however, and store my actual Movies \ Videos \ music on SATA, Plex is very fast when you do this…
@wesman said:
Just and an FYI, 99.9% of all hard drives on the market to day are MORE than fast enough, typically running in the 3+ gbps but you are almost ALWAYS going to be limited by your network 1gbps (110 MBps typically).Further, a 30GB bluray rip only needs ~4 to 5 MBps to Direct Play… So, speed (for Plex) is not an issue… If Plex is the needed issue, then I would go with something Raided 0/1/5/10 for redundancy issues. Your biggest concern is protecting the data from drive failures, not how fast the drive is.
WRONG. WRONG WRONG. Network is NOT weakest link… hard drives are… PERIOD. That is incorrect info. Network will NEVER be the bottleneck… apps, drives, OS, will ALL interfere LONG before you run out of network bandwidth I will GUARANTEE you that.
And 1GB is 112 MB (big ‘B’) bandwidth… blu-ray needs about ~16 Mbps (little ‘b’) 4 to 5 is more for standard DVD movies… RAID is good but complicated for most people, if people are worried about data protection get cloud backup, like me… I backup my entire library to the cloud… or another drive in the house… RAID is overkill for this.
You could stream roughly 80 blu-ray videos over the SAME network simultaneous on a GIG network. Plex, the OS and the drive could not withstand that much activity… but the network surely can…
calculate the bandwidth and storage for a 1080P video (with additional parameters) on this website:
H.264 compressed 1080P HD @ 30 FPS
"High Video Quality"
Average Frame Size: 50KB
Bandwidth Required: 12.0 Mbps
Estimated Storage (24 hours per day * 31 days): 4 TB
I didn’t say it was the weakest, rather, I pointed out that almost any drive would work and you should go for reliability over speed.
@rjparker1 said:
@wesman said:
Just and an FYI, 99.9% of all hard drives on the market to day are MORE than fast enough, typically running in the 3+ gbps but you are almost ALWAYS going to be limited by your network 1gbps (110 MBps typically).
See the big “B” ?
(30 gigabytes) / (120 minutes) = 4.16666667 MBps ---- it’s just math… you can put it right into google…
7200 rpm drives have a typical transfer rate of 100 MB/s. 5400 rpm drives are on average about 30% slower than 7200 rpm drives. STILL way more than what you would need for a movie at ~4 to 5 MBps
Raid, isn’t hard. you can buy storage devices that have it already built in.
@rjparker1 said:
@wesman said:
Just and an FYI, 99.9% of all hard drives on the market to day are MORE than fast enough, typically running in the 3+ gbps but you are almost ALWAYS going to be limited by your network 1gbps (110 MBps typically).Further, a 30GB bluray rip only needs ~4 to 5 MBps to Direct Play… So, speed (for Plex) is not an issue… If Plex is the needed issue, then I would go with something Raided 0/1/5/10 for redundancy issues. Your biggest concern is protecting the data from drive failures, not how fast the drive is.
WRONG. WRONG WRONG. Network is NOT weakest link… hard drives are… PERIOD. That is incorrect info. Network will NEVER be the bottleneck… apps, drives, OS, will ALL interfere LONG before you run out of network bandwidth I will GUARANTEE you that.
And 1GB is 112 MB (big ‘B’) bandwidth… blu-ray needs about ~16 Mbps (little ‘b’) 4 to 5 is more for standard DVD movies… RAID is good but complicated for most people, if people are worried about data protection get cloud backup, like me… I backup my entire library to the cloud… or another drive in the house… RAID is overkill for this.
You could stream roughly 80 blu-ray videos over the SAME network simultaneous on a GIG network. Plex, the OS and the drive could not withstand that much activity… but the network surely can…
calculate the bandwidth and storage for a 1080P video (with additional parameters) on this website:
Bandwidth and Storage Calculator | StarDot Technologies
H.264 compressed 1080P HD @ 30 FPS "High Video Quality" Average Frame Size: 50KB Bandwidth Required: 12.0 Mbps Estimated Storage (24 hours per day * 31 days): 4 TB
Uh, do you understand networks at all? Most networks will run out of speed quicker than a single modern hard drive. Good desktop hard drives are regularly hitting near or above 100MBps. Gigabit network is 125MBps maximum. Once you have a couple of drives in a RAID0/5/6/10, your storage performance is certainly limited by your NETWORK, not your hard drives.
True, but the point is NOT which is fast or better…
- the point is that streaming a movie (or a couple) will never saturate your network connection by themselves.
- Nor will you have need to pull a single move (or a couple) off disk FASTER than 100 MB/s…
Given those two points, you should really concern yourself with redundancy of your data. Pick disks for reliability over speed and raid if possible.
Personally, I have (4) 8TB Drives
Raided with a IO Crest Card
That, is overkill of course, but hey… that’s the way I roll
Really what you to are going back and forth about is how random I/O impact a disk performance. Streaming one continuous stream is easy or 10 streams from 10 different drives is easy. Streaming 5 from the same disk becomes very difficult as the drive has to move the disk head all over the place to pull data from each video file. Raid provides some improvement, but doesn’t fully escape the impact unless you really go overboard on the card you choose. Simply splitting your files between multiple drives can have potentially the same or better impact.
It also doesn’t matter how fast your media drive is if your os drive is overloaded. This is why many choose to go the route of a SSD for their boot drive.
Funny when people start messing with this things about what it’s better or not…
Let me tell you something… @aeonx
I got a WD Blue from 2005 of 640GB < yes 640GB SATA I Still performing really good. 5.4rpm
A Samsung 1TB external from Iomega I cut the cords and connected directly on my PMS Works 5.4rpm
a Seagate 500gb SATA III perfect
a Seagate 160GB! Perfect
and run the PMS on a Samsung SSD 840 pro 128gb. Fast as hell!.
I can run simultaneously Tv series / Movies / Music and streaming Video up to 6 devices at once no bottleneck on my network - everything from 1080 p / Flac / etc…
So don’t worry at all for which HDD if it comes faulty it’s just because you got the winning ticket, just returned to the Manufacturer and keep going…
