David here, I have a Windows 10 Desktop about 6 months old. 16 GB Ram, AMD 4 Core, SSD Drive! I built it myself and works great.
I have WiFi in my house and it works fine. I have 6 external HD’s mostly 4 TB’s each filled with movies, TV series & music. I have all the movies file named with the movie name and then year in (), Example Gone With the Wind (1939)! All my music files have id tags!
In order to watch movies I hook an external drive to my Ti4 Element Kodi media box which is connected to my TV in the living room, I do
not stream anything at all. I use the remote that came with the Kodi box to control the movie.
Now I understand I download the Plex server software for Windows and install this on my home Desktop. Then I attach a external harddrive with my media on it to my Desktop and let the Plex software catalog what is on that external drive? Do I attach each of my 6 external drive to my system one after another and let the Plex software catalog each of the drives. Will the software be able to show which drive a certain movie is on? I currently keep track of where each movie is by using a SpreadSheet!
Next question is do I install some sort of Plex software on my Kodi media box in order to play a movie? Do I still have to attach the external hard drive to the Kodi box? This is totally confusing to me!!
Any help, suggestions or questions will be very appreciated and thanks in advance - David
@dnavratil said:
Do I attach each of my 6 external drive to my system one after another and let the Plex software catalog each of the drives. Will the software be able to show which drive a certain movie is on? I currently keep track of where each movie is by using a SpreadSheet!
If you attach each of your drives to a single computer, and then within the Plex Server add a different library for each drive, then you can name the library after the drive.
Basically, you can have a library called “External 6Tb Drive #1”, add the drive to that library, and it will scan the drive for movies keeping them within that library.
Then create another library called “External 6Tb Drive #2”, add the second drive to this library and so on.
Then, once all added, you can use the search function within your Plex client to find the movie you’re looking for.
Next question is do I install some sort of Plex software on my Kodi media box in order to play a movie? Do I still have to attach the external hard drive to the Kodi box? This is totally confusing to me!!
Plex and Kodi historically don’t really mesh. Where Kodi is a front end for media, Plex is both front end and back end server.
There is an application you can use with Kodi, that will allow it to talk with a Plex server though.
You can find information about that here
@croneter works on it, and there’s some great documentation on the wiki and in the posts.
Good luck mate 
Good answer above and apart from the plugging & unplugging regularly it will work well.
Maybe it’s time to put all your drives in one box.
Low end PC server box , a NAS or DAS
@spikemixture said:
Good answer above and apart from the plugging & unplugging regularly it will work well.
Maybe it’s time to put all your drives in one box.
Low end PC server box , a NAS or DAS
Thanks
I tend to agree with you. When you have so many large drives floating around, it’s a recipe for some kind of failure.
If you’re going to use normal PC hardware, then using a NAS OS like FreeNAS is probably the best bet, as there is a download for FreeBSD, which FreeNAS is based on.
Getting the two to work together should be relatively simple.
There’s lots of info on using FreeNAS with PMS, so a Google search will turn up a heap of tutorials like this one
Put your drives on the PC running Plex. You can keep your Kodi box and point it at the media on the same drives Plex is looking at. I still have Kodi setup, but don’t use the Kodi addons for Plex. My Plex server is in the main house connected to the router, My Kodi box is in a cabin off the main house wired back to the router thru a couple of switches. I can and do use both Plex (Rasplex on a pi2) and Kodi (Asus Chromebox) from the cabin.
@ntrevena said:
@spikemixture said:
Good answer above and apart from the plugging & unplugging regularly it will work well.
Maybe it’s time to put all your drives in one box.
Low end PC server box , a NAS or DAS
Thanks
I tend to agree with you. When you have so many large drives floating around, it’s a recipe for some kind of failure.
If you’re going to use normal PC hardware, then using a NAS OS like FreeNAS is probably the best bet, as there is a download for FreeBSD, which FreeNAS is based on.
Getting the two to work together should be relatively simple.
There’s lots of info on using FreeNAS with PMS, so a Google search will turn up a heap of tutorials like this one
While I do agree on both the part that using external disks as more of a backup (and getting something more akin to a server and/or NAS for the purpose of serving data for/to Plex and Kodi - as a long term solution) and the other part about FreeBSD being awesome - some “Warning!” should be dished out when spreading the gospel about it. Using “normal” PC hardware with FreeNAS isn’t recommended at all (but I’m still today, as fascinated as I was when I first tried FreeBSD in the late 90’s. Things just worked. Magically. Until the port tree broke and cvsup got borked.). Just read the guidelines on their forum - Hardware recommendations (read this first) | TrueNAS Community - and one might start to reconsider this for a “newbie” (as stated by OP). Then there’s the fact that running Plex on a FreeBSD install, for instance, still doesn’t come with the Premium Music feature (afaik).
My viewpoint is that a solution isn’t better than the person who should be able to execute it. Your words and choices are good (albeit the normal hardware-part I might disagree on) - but in this case to this OP I will object slightly that there surely are better options for him/her.
@Peter_W said:
@ntrevena said:
@spikemixture said:
Good answer above and apart from the plugging & unplugging regularly it will work well.
Maybe it’s time to put all your drives in one box.
Low end PC server box , a NAS or DAS
Thanks
I tend to agree with you. When you have so many large drives floating around, it’s a recipe for some kind of failure.
If you’re going to use normal PC hardware, then using a NAS OS like FreeNAS is probably the best bet, as there is a download for FreeBSD, which FreeNAS is based on.
Getting the two to work together should be relatively simple.
There’s lots of info on using FreeNAS with PMS, so a Google search will turn up a heap of tutorials like this one
While I do agree on both the part that using external disks as more of a backup (and getting something more akin to a server and/or NAS for the purpose of serving data for/to Plex and Kodi - as a long term solution) and the other part about FreeBSD being awesome - some “Warning!” should be dished out when spreading the gospel about it. Using “normal” PC hardware with FreeNAS isn’t recommended at all (but I’m still today, as fascinated as I was when I first tried FreeBSD in the late 90’s. Things just worked. Magically. Until the port tree broke and cvsup got borked.). Just read the guidelines on their forum - Hardware recommendations (read this first) | TrueNAS Community - and one might start to reconsider this for a “newbie” (as stated by OP). Then there’s the fact that running Plex on a FreeBSD install, for instance, still doesn’t come with the Premium Music feature (afaik).
My viewpoint is that a solution isn’t better than the person who should be able to execute it. Your words and choices are good (albeit the normal hardware-part I might disagree on) - but in this case to this OP I will object slightly that there surely are better options for him/her.
You make some good points. Perhaps FreeBSD is a little too much for a newbie.
Unless you know what you’re doing, you can royally break your arrays, and then there’s the driver problems that come along with it.
That said though, a NAS solution of some sort is a good idea. Even just a nice big 5-10 external drive enclosure, that connects to a PC with USB3 or eSATA would be a good place to go. Just turn them into a big storage device that can still be moved from PC to PC?
I want to thank each of the responders who contributed their time to help me on this matter. I’ve got to do a little internet research and find out what a NAS is (I really even don’t no what a Server is yet). Give me a few day to come up with some new questions concerning NAS and hard drives. Tks, David
