Need advice for transitioning from many external usb drives to a RAID5 NAS configuration.

General Discussions
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I have spent a long time and more money than my wife needs to know about to build up our Plex experience. We use it every single day. Right now I run Plex from an iMac with 13 usb hard drives attached. Clearly I did not plan well when I started my local media server adventure a decade ago. :slight_smile:

I think it’s time to do a major upgrade and I’m considering moving my media library to one or more NAS boxes and configuring RAID5 to protect our library. I’m looking for advice in setup as well as feedback from others with a NAS library where the Plex server runs on a different box on the same network.

Questions:

  1. Qnap, Synology or build my own NAS?
  2. Should I reconfigure my network to put the NAS boxes on the same network segment as my Plex server to maximize throughout?
  3. Should I abandon the Mac server and build a Win10 PC for Plex? (I’ve read there can be issues on Mac with network drives and Plex)
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RAID5 isn’t recommended by anyone, anylonger. Large companies like Dell etc has publicly denounced the usage of that technology in their servers for example. Articles going back as far as 2007 talks about how one should not use it - http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/ - so it’s important that you know the drawbacks if you really decide to go down that route. Regardless of route, I wouldn’t stop using my USB-drives - I’d just reallocate them to backup. Because it won’t matter which technology you use - in the end a good backup will be the difference between endless hours of grief and a few hours of reading the stuff back.

There’s been a plenty of threads like this about Qnap, Synology vs building your own NAS. And all of us has our own version of it and what we like (and think is best). I believe that RAID5 is the only one most of us can come to agreement upon - and not to use it. Many like Qnap and Synology for their ease of use, especially if you don’t want to run the Plex server on it (since many of them has a less powerful CPU that can’t handle transcoding). Many will recommend using FreeNAS or perhaps even Unraid (even if I don’t really like Unraid since it’s so closed).

I often link to this article in these type of threads to point out the fact about the actual filesystem used - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/ - and why I personally went with ZFS for my storage needs (even though my sever is a tad bit more than just storage :slight_smile: ).

A very competent fellow forum user as put together a build-your-own tutorial with Snap Raid and Drivepool - https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1113655#Comment_1113655 - so that might be something to consider too.

You’ll most likely get many more opinions about this as I’ve said - but in the end, as I also said haha, don’t forget about backups. Regardless of route you take!

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Another vote for:

  • No RAID5. You want more than 1 disk’s worth of redundancy to survive UBEs during rebuild after recovering from another drive failure.
  • Build your own if you want to run PMS on the same box as the NAS
  • unRAID isn’t really great and in my opinion doesn’t deserve to have “RAID” in the name. False sense of security compared to traditional RAID.

Learning is fun. :slight_smile: And FreeNAS is cool, but plan your attack.