I have a Plex Media Library of about 10TB. The Plex I use is just for myself and my partner, it gets relatively light use just a couple of hours a day at most and it is just on when my home PC is on. I am not opposed to a NAS but I don’t really need it and it looks likely to be expensive in terms of hardware and energy.
I currently have my Plex libaries on cloud storage but wish to move my files to a local drive at home. As I already have 10TB of files I am looking at drives with a capacity of 14 TB to 16TB to give me some wiggle room as a prune my files once I have them on a local drive. I was also going to look into something like backblaze as back up.
I am worried about things like heat and noise as the HHD will need to sit on my desktop where I work but as I said it wouldn’t be accessed much during the day so would hopefully be idle much of the time.
Can anyone give me any advice on which HHD’s to look at for this purpose? I’d like to keep my costs to less than £500? I am open to various solutions even using smaller 2.5 drives but I would prefer a single unit that I connect to my PC as opposed to multiple HHD spread everywhere.
We are talking about storage for your media files, not about the storage for your Plex data folder, right?
Media files (even 4K UHD videos) are relatively low bandwidth, compared to other uses. Particularly they are typically written once and read multiple times, and always sequentially from beginning to end.
So you can use almost any type of hard drive – even those with “shingled magnetic storage” (as long as you don’t put them into a RAID array). These drives are sometimes advertised for “archival” purposes.
This opens a very wide selection of potential models for you.
If you never plan to put the drive(s) into a NAS, there is no need to go for special “NAS” or “data center” drives. These might run hotter and noisier than you’d like.
Though you should keep in mind, that some external hard drive models which are “optimized” for power saving will spin down their platters rather aggressively. Which then can sometimes cause Plex server to assume that a media file has been deleted.
You should disable “Empty trash automatically after every scan” – but I guess you know that already from your use of cloud storage.
A 12 TB drive currently goes for about 230€ Which leaves plenty for an external USB-connected drive enclosure which can house 1 or 2 regular desktop sized hard drives.
There might even be enough left of your budget to go for a 4-bay enclosure.
Yes it is just for my media files my plex data folder is stored on a ssd inside my pc.
I don’t have my trash set to empty automatically so that should be fine but thank you for alerting me to that possibility. I’d not really considered SMR vs CMR although I prefered to go for CMR for another drive put in my pc last year. I don’t plan to put the disks in a raid array so perhaps the SMR disks would be fine.
Which is too big for the desk but I do have some floor space for it and it would leave room to add more disks in future. I will do more research before I buy anything!
Something to keep in mind. I’m in a similar situation and have learned that all of the HDD enclosures I have found will not turn back on automatically after a power failure. In the big picture, I suppose it is not a big deal, but it is annoying when I’m elsewhere and cannot access media because of a (far too common) short power outage.
I don’t think that will be an issue for me as I only really use the plex at home and don’t like leaving my pc etc turned on when I am away. If I do want to access films or music on holiday I usually just download them to my device then take my google chrome with me and stream to the tv that way. But for those who do need to access their media away from home its a fair point. I suppose the UPS units might be a good option for them.
