For the life of me I can’t seem to figure out what drive configuration I want to use. I researched the FreeNAS route but that doesn’t seem to be 100% supported. I looked into UnRaid and can’t seem to figure that out. Then I researched different raid configurations and some people said RAID 5 is better than RAID 10 and vise versa. Right now I have a ton of media in Plex stored on 3x 1TB drives and 1x 500GB drive.
I have a motherboard that comes with 8 sata ports so I’m going to buy a rackmount media server case . I just don’t know what size drives to migrate all my media to and what configuration to put them in so I have some redundancy.
“It depends”
You’ll get slightly different answers depending on who you’re talking to.
RAID5 is generally considered dead, as with large disk sizes it takes too long to rebuild and you risk losing another disk in that period. If however you’ve got all your media backed up elsewhere it’s still a viable option.
Then you get into the arguments around RAID6 vs RAID10. Those ultimately come down to usable space (RAID6 wins) vs speed of rebuilds (RAID10 wins). RAID6 has the slight reliability advantage in that any 2 disks can fail and leave the service running, whereas in RAID10 if both disks in a pair fail you lose the array. I’ve been professionally managing many RAID10 arrays for the last decade+ and I’ve never (yet) had that happen.
Size choice will come down to how many bays your case has vs how much money you have vs how much media you have. Oh, and how much expansion room you want. There’s little point in filling those bays now with small disks if you expect to add lots more media.
As for FreeNAS, it may not be officially supported by Plex, but the underlying OS (FreeBSD) is and there’s a community here that supports it. Spend some time browsing the FreeNAS sub-forum here, and the official FreeNAS forums.
Don’t go rackmount unless power usage and noise are non-issues. They’re designed for that kind of environment so for the home user it can be a bit of a shock. You can get regular server tower chassis that support 8+ drive bays.
I already have a rack and no noise and power is not concern. I’m combining it with a Cisco home lab I already have.
…and even if noise was a concern, a rackmounted server using a fanless PSU and the right cooling fans will result in a silent sever. I personally like noctua fans
