Been around Plex for a few years now but I need to upgrade my storage again. Have a combination of Western Digital red and black drives but I’m not sure if one is better than the other. What’s the best drive to go with? Does it have to be 7200 RPM, or is 5400 RPM enough? Have a good amount of friends and family I share to so servers pretty much always running. Thanks in advance
Will you be using this as a standalone drive or part of a RAID set?
If it’s going to be just a single drive, it doesn’t really matter, although the Reds are optimized to be a part of a RAID set. The single-drive equivalent of the Red series is the Green series. It has to do with how disk faults are handled. If you might want to do a RAID in the future and have multiple Reds, I’d say use a Black for this single drive scenario and save the Reds to be part of the later array.
If you are doing a RAID set, stick to “NAS”-labeled drives like WD Red and HGST NAS as per above. From your usage description is sounds like you may want to consider going the NAS/RAID route.
Either way, you don’t need beastly performance for this kind of media storage and playback. Capacity will likely always be a bigger issue for you.
I don’t run Nas or have a raid setup. Set it up in an enclosure with 4 drives that I have a duplicate enclosure with 4 drives that I sync over bi-weekly and keep disconnected at a separate location.
Currently have (2) 2 TB WD Black drives and (2) WD Red drives in each enclosure. Going to replace one 2TB Black in each with an 8TB just not sure if on is better than the other. Don’t seem to have any stream issues ever (shared with about 10 friends and family over fiber internet). Also don’t know if 7200 is a “yes!” or if 5400 would be fine for media streaking (as it is $250 instead of $300)
