Need more Storage and I am looking for Suggestions

General Discussions
1

So I am newer to PLEX and I am loving it.

Here is what I have currently.

i7-6700 3.4GHZ
16GB RAM
2TB Interneal with a 12TB WD External
Running Windows 10

I would like to find someway to store and backup my media that is not too expensive, reliable, quick and expandable (if possible). Someone recommended a Drobo 8 Bay to me (can snag one used on eBay for Cheap).

I thought I would get some input from the PLEX community before making my purchase.

2

Well you can build a FreeNAS box with old hardware and just add new drives in a raid configuration, RAID 5 is good “enough” for sub 20 disks. It does require that you are comfortable with linux .

Check out http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/01/diy-nas-2015-edition.html

3

WD just released a pretty good 16tb WD My Book not too long ago for around $500ish. Pretty solid USB 3 drive enclosure. I picked up a few just to test them out and they are solid so far.

4

@Night said:
Well you can build a FreeNAS box with old hardware and just add new drives in a raid configuration, RAID 5 is good “enough” for sub 20 disks. It does require that you are comfortable with linux .

There’s much wrong with this statement.

  1. You do not want to just use “any old hardware” for FreeNAS. FreeNAS is particular about the type and specific hardware and so you want to choose your hardware with FreeNAS in mind, not just scrounge up whatever is cheap/free then try to get FreeNAS to run on it. You will not have a good experience, and the folks on the FreeNAS forum will dismiss you because you violated primary instruction #1 posted all over their forums and FAQs and such.

  2. You do not use “RAID5” with FreeNAS. There’s RAIDZ1 which is similar, but not the same

  3. Neither RAID5 nor RAIDZ1 is suitable for modern drive sizes. The reasons have been outlined countless times. You’re fooling yourself with a false sense of security if you depend on a single drive’s worth of redundancy so you go RAID6/RAIDZ2 if this actually matters to you, otherwise your data is pretty much just as at-risk as no redundancy at all.

  4. Well before you got to 20 disks you’d definitely want something above RAID6/RAIDZ2.

  5. FreeNAS runs on FreeBSD, not Linux

  6. #5 doesn’t matter much since 99.9% of what you’ll do is not on the command line at all anyway. If you’re doing something in FreeNAS from the command line, you’d better be damn sure that’s the proper way otherwise you’ll probably break things. Setting up and updating PMS in your FreeNAS jail is one exception, as you aren’t messing with FreeNAS itself at that point.

5

@sremick said:

@Night said:
Well you can build a FreeNAS box with old hardware and just add new drives in a raid configuration, RAID 5 is good “enough” for sub 20 disks. It does require that you are comfortable with linux .

There’s much wrong with this statement.

  1. You do not want to just use “any old hardware” for FreeNAS. FreeNAS is particular about the type and specific hardware and so you want to choose your hardware with FreeNAS in mind, not just scrounge up whatever is cheap/free then try to get FreeNAS to run on it. You will not have a good experience, and the folks on the FreeNAS forum will dismiss you because you violated primary instruction #1 posted all over their forums and FAQs and such.

  2. You do not use “RAID5” with FreeNAS. There’s RAIDZ1 which is similar, but not the same

  3. Neither RAID5 nor RAIDZ1 is suitable for modern drive sizes. The reasons have been outlined countless times. You’re fooling yourself with a false sense of security if you depend on a single drive’s worth of redundancy so you go RAID6/RAIDZ2 if this actually matters to you, otherwise your data is pretty much just as at-risk as no redundancy at all.

  4. Well before you got to 20 disks you’d definitely want something above RAID6/RAIDZ2.

  5. FreeNAS runs on FreeBSD, not Linux

  6. #5 doesn’t matter much since 99.9% of what you’ll do is not on the command line at all anyway. If you’re doing something in FreeNAS from the command line, you’d better be damn sure that’s the proper way otherwise you’ll probably break things. Setting up and updating PMS in your FreeNAS jail is one exception, as you aren’t messing with FreeNAS itself at that point.

1 you are right, It does need alto of fiddling to get working on some older hw, but still doable-
2+3, And ZFS is great I said raid5 do to experience where “most” plex users aquieres their content when they scale up, which is highly expendable content.

4, Last time i built a large scale storage for office environment i used raid6+0, there are very few users that is at that scale for plex.

6, you are again correct, but I believe as with any unix based environment core knowladge is highly useful and relevant no mather how much is added on top of it

6

You’ll find Synology and Qnap are also very popular for use with Plex. They can function as servers if no transcoding is needed. In regular NAS mode, they’re incredibly modular. Synology is the favorite due to the DSM interface.