Hard drive questions

General Discussions
1

Hello,

I’m in need of adding another hard drive to my Plex setup. Last time I was able to purchase a couple of Toshiba Canvio desktop drives for a good price. They have 7200rpm drives and don’t appear to have issues spinning constantly and come with a 3 year warranty. Before that I had a horrendous time with some Seagate 3tb drives. Two of them died within a week of each other within a month of both going out of warranty which made me very leery of going with Seagate again. One of my other drives was also Seagate (4tb) but it appears to be OK, though it’s not actually being used directly with Plex for video but as a backup drive for a smaller WD drive that is. It is being used for music and photos with Plex however and has lasted so far.

So I have two questions, what brands that can be had for reasonable prices are people currently happy and having a good experience with? Have Seagate drives improved? Some websites (like Amazon) have really good reviews for those drives and others (like Costco and Newegg) do not. I don’t get that.

The second questions is, can I somehow use a computer tower to install multiple hard drives to make a sort of “rack” that could be used as external drives? I cannot find clear answers on this one way or the other in my Google and YouTube searches. I’m basically trying to keep the drives as USB 3 plug and play but in a more elegant form factor than a growing number of random hard drives sitting around.

Thanks in advance!

2

As far as I know there exist drive housings with USB3 connections which can hold ~ 8 drives.
I distinctly remember one regular in these forums who uses 3 of them.

Take a look at this thread https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/205689/usb-vs-sata-hdd

3

For Hard drives themselves, here is how Backblaze reported their drive stats (60,000+ drives) for this year. They are pretty darn accurate too

4

I was running Seagate 1.5 TB drives for a long time (you’ll see that in the thread that @OttoKerner mentioned), and I consider myself one of the lucky ones, as I had no major issues. I have since however moved to WD 3 TB Red drives and never looked back.

I also moved them internal to my server and am using SATA III interfaces. USB external enclosures worked fine for me, as long as it was 3.0 and not 2.0. But your mileage may vary.

5

@raevengel said:
Hello,

So I have two questions, what brands that can be had for reasonable prices are people currently happy and having a good experience with? Have Seagate drives improved? Some websites (like Amazon) have really good reviews for those drives and others (like Costco and Newegg) do not. I don’t get that.

We’ve got boxes full of failed HDDs at work from all brands. I’ve personally had 5 out of 20 WD and 3 out of 12 Seagates fail so I don’t really trust any of them. For me, important data gets backed up to multiple locations and not so important ones get parity protection (RAID-6, unRAID, disParity).

I do tend to stick to Seagate and WD since they both do cross shipping.

The second questions is, can I somehow use a computer tower to install multiple hard drives to make a sort of “rack” that could be used as external drives? I cannot find clear answers on this one way or the other in my Google and YouTube searches. I’m basically trying to keep the drives as USB 3 plug and play but in a more elegant form factor than a growing number of random hard drives sitting around.

Do you already have a computer enclosure that you’re hoping to reuse or is it pretty much you just don’t want to have a bunch of drives lying around? If it’s the latter, you can buy an external RAID enclosure.

http://www.newegg.com/RAID-Enclosure-Subsystems/SubCategory/ID-509

6

I have a Seagate Wirless Plus is it possible to add it to my plex server

7

@bigbear422@gmail.com said:
I have a Seagate Wirless Plus is it possible to add it to my plex server

If your Plex server can see it, then yes. (as point of order, please considerate of others’ threads ? thanks)