Hardware RAID vs. JBOD + Software RAID for Plex

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Looking for some advice here. I running my Plex server on an old(ish) pc with an i3-4360 running Ubuntu server 19.10, which also serves as my in-home backup server. I am looking to expand my storage with a 5-bay drive enclosure, but I am weighing the pros and cons of using an enclosure with Hardware Raid vs a simple JBOD setup and running software RAID in Ubuntu.

By my understanding, Hardware raid is much faster, simpler, and less CPU-intensive, but I’m concerned about reliability in the budget-class enclosures that I can afford, and I understand that transferring the drives to a new enclosure will likely result in data loss even using the same brand/model of enclosure as a replacement.

On the other hand, software raid is slower and more intensive, but since I will only ever connect the enclosure to a single machine it seems like it should be more reliable so long as I keep my operating system properly backed up, as the RAID configuration will always be saved to the OS independent of which enclosure the drives are installed in.

I do stream 4K movies, and I routinely ask my poor, ageing CPU to transcode uncompressed Blu-Ray rips, so speed is important to me. At the same time, I rarely have more than 1-2 users at any given time.

Does anyone have experience with Hardware vs. Software RAID on a Plex server that might be able to point me in the right direction? My goal is 16TB of usable storage (after parity), with slightly better speed and reliability than a single 16TB drive, for under $1000.

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The price of the drives will be your cost driver here.

Synology and QNAP both use software RAID (mdadm). It has the benefit, which I’ve tested, of allowing the drives to be removed from the NAS box then mounted in a desktop system / used with external USB enclosures as disaster recovery.

It took longer to relocate the drives than it did to “assemble” the raid in Linux.
The RAID LVs came up as /dev/mdX which were mounted (they were ext4 formatted).

The only package some distros will require is the installation of mdadm (the control program)

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Thanks, Chuck. That sounds great. I’ll definitely read a little deeper into mdadm.

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Just wanted to follow up on this. I wound up buying a 5-disk USB Enclosure (Oyen Mobius 5C) with 4TB Ironwolf drives and connecting it up to my machine. I’m running software RAID 5 with mdadm in Ubuntu as recommended, and it is running perfectly. Transfer speeds are a little slower than I was getting on a single drive, but that’s to be expected with this configuration, and speeds are still more than adequate for my use case. Thanks for the input!

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