HDD Setup Moving Forward?

General Discussions
1

Currently I just have a 5TB External as my TV show storage and a 3TB internal as my Movie storage. But both are less than 100GB from full.

Now I have enough media where I don’t want to have to have to put it all back on my PC in the future if I lose a drive. First thought that came to my mind was a RAID 5 setup to have parity. But I’ve heard some other options that are good too.

I don’t really want to use any cloud services since I have data caps. I’m most likely going to be moving to 15 or 20TB of space. What are solid methods others are using out there? Downside to RAID 5 is all the disks sharing a size and such. Having an option that wasn’t so picky on that might be nice. So hit me with it!

2

Having just one parity drive is more or less obsolete by now due to disk size. You need at least two parity drives for it to achieve redundancy, but do not forget that it is not backup nor safety in that sense. It is a mean to achieve high up time and better your fault tolerance in a critical setup. Some RAID solutions give you other benefits too, by them involving next-gen file systems such as BTRFS and ZFS.

Are you aiming to expand upon the current setup, build a separate DAS/NAS entity that purely holds the media, or build a whole new setup that holds both media and Plex?

3

Just looking to expand on my current setup for the most part.

4

With external disks or internal? Do you have room for so many internal disks? Which OS?

5

Internal was kind of the plan. I do have room for a few more and it’s W10 x64.

6

In such case I’d suggest looking at Snapraid and Drivepool. I’ve not used myself but it sounds like a plausible solution for you and there are users on this very forum who has used it with success - https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/131308/cayars-setup-walk-through-and-some-tips-and-tricks/p22 (a little bit down that page).