Hi together
I run a Plex server with about 17TB of movies and series. As I would like to build a new and larger Plex server soon, I would like to get some advice first.
These are the components I already own:
- 2 x 512GB SSD
- 8 x 10TB HDD
- 1 x Nvidia Quadro P2000
I am interested in these systems and I can spend about 800$.
System One:
Synology 8-bay (1819+ or something else) with RAID6 + a small PC (Server) with a cheap AMD Ryzen and my P2000 for encoding.
System Two:
A Big Tower with space for 8-10 HDDs, better 3rd gen Ryzen + my Nvidia P2000 for encoding and maybe little video editing. Operating System: Unraid + Windows 10
System Three:
A Big Tower with space for 8-10 HDDs, better 3rd gen Ryzen + my Nvidia P2000 for encoding and maybe little editing. Operating System: Windows 10 + Hardware Raid Controller (Raid6)
What confuse me are many forum posts where people say that generally Raid5 or Raid6 are not suitable for large data as movie files or large disks.
It would take up to 3-4 days to restore a 10TB disk, and there may be more disks failing during this time.
What about Unraid and parity2, is this similar to a hardware Raid6? What would you recommend to me with this budget?
I know a Raid is not a backup, but I can backup about 10TB separately. I would just back up the most important movies.
I use Mac and Windows privately. I would prefer a Mac system, but I would have to buy an external expansion for my P2000 or the old Mac Pro 5.1.
I am open to any recommendation.
Thank you!
one thing to keep in mind is power consumption.
since the server needs to be on to be useful, in most cases 24 hours a day even though it most likely is used only a few hours each evening…
my setup is two Synology NAS 8 bay units, they hold only the media
and a few Intel NUC’s as PMS servers. (they are all clones and just service different users mainly for transcoding),
Each would sleep when not in use to conserve power (sleep worked prior to the Version 1.16).
I’m also thinking about to get a 8-bay synology and use a small pc next to it for transcoding. Is it worth to get a 10gbe card for the synology? I don’t wanna move my 4K content from the computer (where I download the content) to the synology with 1gbe line, it’s very slow.
Do you use Raid5 or Raid6 on your 8-bay nas?
You should never use RAID5 with such large disks for many reasons, but the main 2 are…
-
You can only lose 1 disk in the array. Lose more, and your array is dead and the data is lost.
-
In the event of a failed disk, the RAID rebuild times once you replace that disk are very long, and stress out the remaining disks, which in turn threaten another disk failing.
I always use RAID10.
In this configuration, you can lose 2 disks and the array still runs with no data loss. Also, RAID10 is very fast.
100% agreed! That’s a disaster waiting to happen. At the minimum, have a full backup.
Everything after this is just me getting technical for fun: It doesn’t change the answer of “Don’t use RAID 5 for 8 drives!”.
Apologies for getting nit-picky but that’s not necessarily true: You can still lose everything in a RAID 10 if you lose the wrong 2 disks. RAID 10 just vastly increases the likelihood of surviving the loss of 2 disks, which of course is zero chance for a RAID 5 setup.
Isn’t RAID 5 nearly comparable to RAID 10 for purposes of pure read speed?
My NAS units are setup as, Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) (With data protection of 2 disks fault-tolerance)…
Getting a 10GB card is only useful if your whole network is 10GB…
My whole network is 1GB wired (one exception the HDHomeRuns they are only 100mb and are on there own subnet) and I have never had a problem or bottleneck…
Yes indeed, however I didn’t want to complicate matters.
Generally RAID10 is a little faster on Reads, but significantly faster on Writes. There is a large overhead with RAID5 when writing data, as the controller has to calculate and then write the Parity bit.
Yep. Since Plex usually involves a lot more reading than writing, I was focused on that portion. Writing to a RAID 5 is about the same speed as writing to a single drive.
Thunderbolt3 to 10GBe adapter on my mac and 10gbe card on the synology or PC just for data transfer after the download.
My goal is to copy all the content as fast as possible to the media server. It should be fast than a regular 1gbe connection. For streaming 1gbe is enough.
I would choose Raid6 on Synology or this “Raid6” on Unraid anyway since I have 8x10tb drives. 60tb for content should be enough for the next 2-3 years.
Unraid and Synology are expendable. I’m just not sure about the Transfer speeds on Unraid. I read it’s not that fast if you don’t add some SSD cache to it. If I can reach speeds up to 5x faster than 1GBE port I would be happy.
