I’ve been using Plex primarily as a DVR replacement, but have decided to digitalize my movie library and utilize Plex for this as well. I’m going to get a new external hard drive to do this, and I’m debating what size to get. So I’m wondering, for those of you who use Plex for movies, what is the size of your movie library? I’m curious about the total size of the library, the number of movies, and whether you have just the movie rip or the entire disc image.
The quick answer would be the largest you can afford, as it will fill up more quickly than you expect. I would start by counting how many movies you have in DVD and BlueRay form. How many of those you will digitize, how many new movies you purchase monthly/quarterly/yearly and at which quality you wish to digitize them or store in ISO format. Then sum up the gigabytes and make a decision.
I would also suggest purchasing something that is easily expandable. External HDD might sound like a good idea, until you end up with five or six of them in different size with all you stuff scattered on them. So having a look at NAS, UnRaid or Drobo type solutions would be a good idea.
Doing a quick search of the forum should give you some threads discussing the best way to digitize your media.
I personally use UnRaid as it does offer limited drive failure protection with ease of expandability. With this year's BF deals I have around 9TB of storage which should last me comfortably for the following year or two.
The largest collection that I have heard of is a monster 109TB system, in which the owner is storing full rips of his Bluray collection.
So I have about 400 movies in various forms, from “Apple TV” format to full blu ray rip, plus another 30 or so TV shows with their seasons. That plus Netflix gives me a pretty big library in terms of number of titles but in total, its about 1.3TB in total size. I use a Synology DS209 RAID1 formatted. I am about to upgrade the two 1.5TB internal HD to the new WD 3TB. BTW, the two 1.5TB drives have lasted me a year, but the next 1.5 should last longer as I am no longer ripping a ton of stuff as i was when initially digitizing my library.
I’m of the school of thought that not every blu ray has to be ripped and stored in full 1080p. Do I really need “Something about Mary, Cool Hand Luke or The Godfather” in 1080p? For movies like that, i ripped and re-encoded using handbrake to the “AppleTV’ or a derivate of it (usually 720p) format, which on my 60” Kuro looks more than fine. At some point, all of these will be available for streaming at full 1080p quality, so I’m a believer in ripping it to the point of satisfaction. For Avatar, and other films that ‘warrant’ retaining it in full blu ray format i do, but its a small percentage of the titles I have (things like Iron Man, etc, lots of action, lots of CGI, etc etc).
I would agree with the above post that simply buying external HDD’s isn’t the best, but its a viable solution. I’d also recommend a NAS or UnRaid device for their redundancy, ease of expandability and ability to operate as a media server.
For digitizing I’d recommend Handbrake (free) and MakeMKV which is free for the first 50-days or until a new beta is available, otherwise i think its $40. I purchased it and it was a good investment.
I used a 1TB drive for over a year without storing 30GB movies, and really only a handful that were bigger than 3GB. What killed me is when I started storing syndicated shows recorded off of the TV. I have about 500GB and about 400 offline movies. Once I started recording and storing TV I saw the space go. I bought the 2TB WD drive at Target on Black Friday for $70. Both are hooked are external USB drives. Moved TV to 2TB. I have hardwire gigabit and have no issue streaming to any other comp in the house if the drive is mounted on the remote comp’s desktop.
Keep an eye out for discount computer stores. Around here we have a place called Microcenter, and their normal prices are around the sale prices of big box store.
Thanks for the replies! I’ve looked into it further and decided on an UnRaid server. It seems to be exactly what I was looking for, plus I am able to use a lot of things I had around the house and found some great end-of-the-year deals on hard drives. From what I’ve read, people have successfully streamed full HD over a wireless server. Is this correct? Or would I be better off trying to connect over ethernet? The problem is, it would be difficult to run a cord from my router to the mini.
Congratulations on choosing UnRaid. Unfortunately, if you wish to stream full blown 1080p (like raw uncompressed Blu-ray rips) over wireless no current home wireless solution will give you 100% guaranteed service. Theoretically, the bandwidth should be able to do it, but it seems very situational. If you already have the gear I would suggest testing it out and you might be one of the lucky ones.
If you do wired here is a post on the UnRaid forums of a user who has tested streaming full HD content over wired Ethernet. [unRAID Video streaming performance tests](http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9746.0)
2.7 TB, approximately 95 24-hour days’ worth of video by my math.
12tbytes storage on my main NAS using ZFS partitioning on FreeNAS 8 RC2. With 6tbytes used currently. My downloader box has 3tbyte and uses SAB and Sickbeard to automatically download then connects to my windows server in Vmware EXSi which uses therenamer to sort files and runs the new windows PMS. And, I am still looking for ways to improve the setup.
Once the Windows PMS becomes more stable i will be a happy happy man.
I just surpassed the 1k movies mark. (yay me!!!) @ 1019 to be exact. 106 different TV shows with about 2600 episodes. This takes up a total of 2.7TB + 100 gigs worth of movie trailers and 50 gigs of music videos
8TB with 836 movies and 23 tv shows (don’t know how many episodes of each
My server disk layout :
zpool status:<br />
Pool<br />
pool: rpool<br />
state: ONLINE<br />
scan: resilvered 9.82G in 0h2m with 0 errors on Fri Jun 17 22:40:38 2011<br />
config:<br />
<br />
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM<br />
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c2t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c2t1d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
<br />
errors: No known data errors<br />
<br />
pool: tank<br />
state: ONLINE<br />
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 3h17m with 0 errors on Sun Jul 24 12:32:59 2011<br />
config:<br />
<br />
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM<br />
tank ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c1t0d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c1t1d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c1t2d0s2 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c1t3d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c1t4d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
c1t5d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0<br />
<br />
errors: No known data errors
My library size :
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14596577/guillaume/plex/zfsfolder.jpg
My library right now ( 4 months since I started it ) :
[Export](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14596577/guillaume/plex/export/index.html)
1622 Movies
242 TV Shows with 12,876 episodes
Total Library Size: 17TB
I can’t remember what life was like pre Plex. It works flawlessly 98% of the time. 
This is a bit of a brag post… 18 TB - 2200+ movies 230+ TV Series + lots of docs, music and reality.3 raid arrays with 22tb capacity, waiting for 4tb hard drives so I can do away with fickle raids.
Baaaaaah
5176 Movies on QNAP NAS 809Pro
633 TV Shows (26169 episodes) on QNAP NAS 879Pro
596Anime Series (21761 episodes) on QNAP NAS 809Pro
That's what I have for now.
1 Like
I have colo hosted about 500 movies (only totaling 488GB disk out of total space of 1.44TB). All movies are 720p or minimum of 1080p using a very compressed format of mine. I have about 50+ people sharing these videos and use a 100mbit up/down dedicated line with unlimited traffic to stream. I don’t really do much/care much about TV shows to be honest, since I would have to spend so much time updating stuff all the time.
I don't have exact number of movies, but it is about 3TB. I'm planning to buy Q-NAP 4x3TB, very soon.
My own media library is focused more on TV shows than on movies, so I currently have over 400 TV shows and over 700 Movies.
The TV shows vary greatly in size of course, from mini-series of just 2-4 episodes to long-running shows of over 200 episodes.
All in all I think the number of video files is somewhere around 20,000, most of which are thus TV show episodes.
Their storage is distributed over a number of HDDs, including some internal to my 4 PCs and some external USB HDDs.
Some of the HDDs have other uses too, but I think at least 6TB is dedicated to storage of the media library.
Best regards: Ronald Andersson (aka: dlanor)
I own 2TB of TV Series (100 shows) and 750GB of 1.000 movies (60% 720p highly compressed by YIFY, the rest is in dvdrip)
Mirrored in 2 WD Passport 2TB
I suppose I will byte since this post looks thoroughly resurrected.
I am currently using 12.7TB of my 18.1TB hardware raid 5 array.
This is made up of 2239 movies and 204 shows comprised of 16064 individual episodes.
Might seem a bit crazy, but I currently have 7 3tb and 3 2tb (soon to be replaced with 3tb ones) drives in a FreeNAS box.
Currently I have 4460 movies and 694 tv series (606 anime series and 88 live action shows/animated sitcoms like Family Guy). :)
