My current media storage is on an older PC that happens to hold 5 3.5" HDD’s comfortably. One is the System (C:) drive. The other 4 run as a Pool using DriveBender software (pseudo Raid like function with ability to mix and match drives. This device seems to be nearing end of life and replacing it looks like a custom build (by me?).
One alternative would be to get an external enclosure and a small foot print PC. Most will do USB3 (some sata/esata). What is the current 2019 experience with using an external set of drives? To build a PC looks like I’ll need a Tower that might not fit into my rack cabinet (I’m sure they’ll be high priced towers out there, but saving space in my cabinet would be a good thing for airflow)
Agreed.
Before I shut down my local server I had an 8 bay USB3 enclosure for overspill.
No issues whatsoever even streaming 4K remuxes with extremely high bitrates.
Read reviews though. Some sound like a jet engine.
Well to be honest mine was distracting on high speed settings only.
Slow/Medium is fine. It tends to be more an issue when you get up to 6 to 8 bay models.
Either way easily fixed by modding the fans.
The best thing about them (when they’re in stock, I guess), is inside of mine were 8TB WD Reds - Drives costing, at the time, twice what the My Books sold for.
The next best thing is they sold me on Reds so much I bought two internals - 4 and 6TB to replace some aged and ailing WD Green Drives I had - the performance such an improvement I can’t wait until the other 2 greens I have start dying (or drop dead).
I had reservations about externals once - no more. These are stellar.
I looked at all that stuff too - all that expensive stuff. I bought 2 8TB My Books for about $90 ($86 for one and $92 for the other one a bit later - I can appreciate a sale as well as the next guy), the same drives within going for over $200, at the time.
The Internal 4/6TB Reds I got were, on sale, $96/$104, respectfully - so other options do exist if one is so inclined to explore a bit.
I run one of these connected to a USB3.0 card in my Server.
Quiet as a mouse, currently with 4x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives, configured in a RAID10 array, giving me 10.9TB of usable storage. And because it’s in a RAID10, its very fast.
Unfortunately I only have 615GB of free space left, and so at some point in the next few months, I’m gonna have to spend another grand on disks to fill the 4x free bays in the ICY Box.
They had it on sale last week for $199 with free shipping (depending on location, I think). I’m pretty sure it was around this price for Black Friday as well. I ordered one and it’s en route on a UPS truck as I type this.
Not entirely identical. They are 2 different models, one with a RAID controller an one without.
Thinking about it, I do seem to remember I bought mine from scan.co.uk, and not Amazon.
I have been totally happy with it, however I would definitely recommend the unit with RAID to help protect your content. As I said, I am using RAID10 and it is also very fast, which is useful if you share your content and therefore run multiple streams at once.
Speaking of speed - those two My Books via USB 3.0 smoke everything else in my Plexiverse except that 6TB WD Red Internal (larger cache)… most things start playing before I’m ready to watch 'em…lol
Pointers are good. We’ve provided quite a few - no bad choices really.
Had prior bad experiences with both WD and Seagate USB external drives, including WD Cloud. I swore I would never go back to a device that breaks before the Drive (in each case I was able to harvest the drive from defective network or cpu). With Drive Bender I have flexibility to replace drives (mixing capacities) and recover from single drive failures. So it’s either build a new tower PC or buy a mini PC and add a multi-bay Enclosure. Seems like USB 3 is sufficient for driving Plex. Of course loading media into the machine and cloud backup may have performance impact.
