I have been using Plex for a number of years and currently have a 2TB NAS mapped to it and a 1TB HDD in an older desktop tower mapped to Plex. I am looking to add additional capacity by adding a 2nd hard drive in the desktop tower (that is dedicated to plex).
In the past I have used the WD red HDD for the NAS and a solid state hybrid Seagate hard drive without too many problems.
The purpose of this new drive will be to store and play videos.
Does a solid state hybrid drive really make a significant different for this purpose, as a 2nd hard drive to store/play videos?
What hard drive would you recommend (Seagate vs, WD; blue, black, red, baracuda, ironwolf, etc)?
Does it matter the RPM for this drive: 5400 vs 7200? My red drives for the NAS were 5400 to stay cooler, but will a 5400 take significantly longer to load or causing buffering problems during play back? Does 5400 stay significantly cooler than the 7200, or is that marketing?
First the RPM does not matter as serving up video is not demanding at all so speed of the drive is and speed of access is really of little importance. 5200 RPM drives do run cooler and that can impact life BUT my experience says that if the drive is decently cooled by proper ventilation where it is stored then heat is unimportant.
I “think” red drives are generally better as far as life but I have, lately, been just getting regular Seagate drives and they have lasted a good amount of time. For video storage the drives are not placed under a lot of strain.
For the Plex database itself (not the video files) an SSD drive is reported to make a difference but I have not seen the need. My Plex server runs off a 1tb internal drive and the performance is fine. My video files are all on external USB drives pooled using Drivepool and I never notice any appreciable delay in access. The only area where I notice and performance problem is on startup and that is not too bad. My server takes a few minutes to startup but that is not too bad as a reboot only needs to be performed rarely. I reboot weekly or so but that, probably, is not really needed but it is an old Windows habit I have retained.
All in all just go with drives that are current getting good reviews and have a good warranty and you should be fine.
Thanks to both of you for the advice. I went ahead and purchased a 3TB WD blue hard drive. Now one of these days I need to update the desktop to something with more RAM capability.
Not sure why factual information resulted in a “dislike”. So despite the trolling vendetta of someone on here, I’ll elaborate:
WD “Blue” drives are low-performance drives with a 2y warranty, meant for intermittent (not 24/7) use
WD “Red” drives are higher-performance drives with a 3y warranty, specifically designed to operate constantly 24/7
Sometimes saving money isn’t worth it and costs you more in the long run. If you’re spinning WD Blue drives 24/7, I hope your data is backed up somewhere and you have spare cash for replacement drives.
I wasn’t the one voting on your comment, but I did have a question for you (or anyone else). Maybe I am uninformed about how these drives work, but I though the hard drives would not run unless information was requested from them. There is no operating system on this 2nd drive, but just audio/video files. In this case, wouldn’t the drive be idle until someone requested to watch something?
Idle is still spinning. Unless the have power-down. and the problem with power-down is time to power-up and that the Plex Media Server can show those files as unavailable.
For purposes of streaming video there is absolutely no difference between WD Blue and WD Red except Red will give you an extra year warranty. The mechanics of these drives are exactly the same with the only difference being firmware related. If you are going to put the drive in any type of a RAID array then you will want the Red drive because of TLER… the simplest way to explain this is that if the drive encounters a sector of data that it’s having trouble reading it has to decide how much time it should devote to reading that data… the firmware in a Blue drive tells it to keep trying to read it even if it slows down the read process where a Red drive will skip it because it’s under the assumption that data is stored on another drive somewhere. This isn’t an exact explanation but the easiest paraphrase. There are also different ways the drive handles things like vibration and how long it waits to spin down but these differences arent going to be noticeable for this application.
The good people at Backblaze have tested a few hardrives:
Bottom line there’s no actual difference in longevity or NAS performance based on green/blue/red/NAS/Enterprise/etc. Spindle speed determines throughput, and 5400 is fine for serving video. Really the only thing to consider for bulk storage is price per TB. Everything else is just marketing.
