I’ve been running Plex server for several years on a Windows 10 PC. My current storage solution is to have a series of USB 3.0 external hard drives. I have about 70TB of content on them consisting of 7800 movies (mostly 1080p) and about 500 television series (roughly 32,000 episodes).
Everything is playing on either a Roku box, Roku TV, or an NVidia Shield. I have nothing that is transcoding and don’t play anything remotely. The external drives are creating a large physical footprint, so I’m looking to consolidate them. I know I can build or purchase a multi-bay NAS and I can shuck the hard drives, but I’d was questioning whether that expense is necessary.
Can I buy some kind of multi-bay drive enclosure, transfer shucked drives to it, and plug it into my existing computer without having a full-blown NAS? I’m never going to need transcoding capability, just a huge amount of storage. I’m fine with running Plex server on this or another computer.
I use Unraid in a 24bay Norco case.
This gives you the benefits of a single storage location, but the availability of adding size whenever you need to. You can shuck any drive (size doesn’t matter for unraid) and add them in, but it will need to be a transfer process. ie -
Add first drive (6TB?) , then transfer one of your drives data to the new array.
Then, add that now empty disk to the array, and transfer the next drive.
Rinse and repeat until all your content is transferred, you have a new array that can be further expanded. Smaller footprint and easy to manage.
Unraid will let you run docker containers or VMs also, and if you aren’t transcoding, you could server PMS from the same box.
StarTech.com USB 3.0 eSATA 8-Bay Hot-Swap 2.5/3.5-Inch SATA III Hard Drive Enclosure with UASP is pretty good. Each box holds 8 drives and allows either eSATA or USB connections to the server. It’s easy to run a few of these cases off USB and significantly simplifies the cable mess you probably have. Price is around $300.
The Norco case is a very good choice and costs about $430 or so. This is meant to be an actual computer build and just storage. In order to support that many internal drives you’ll need to be creating with the drive controllers and breakout cables. Factor that those into the costs and it does add up a bit.
You didn’t mention how many current external drives and which kind you have. Some can be removed and used immediately as an internal drive and some will not be readable. Early WD external drives for example used a USB to SATA adapter board that encrypted the drive and made it only readable with that adapter. If these are your current drives you’ll have to copy from external to internal as above post mentioned.
