Hi our main external hard drive for movie storage is full. 
Am I better off (and can I) get a 2nd external har drive and use both as the primary directory / storage for our movie library? Or should I just get a much bigger external hard drive and transfer our existing library to that? Thanks!
Just add a second drive and add the drive letter and folder to your existing movie library.
No need to get fancy.
Excelent. Thanks. Stupid question, but I assume having multiple source drives doesn’t have any issues on PLEX (such as sorting, performance, etc.)?
@ZebraNetwork said:
Excelent. Thanks. Stupid question, but I assume having multiple source drives doesn’t have any issues on PLEX (such as sorting, performance, etc.)?
No. It is supposed to just work.
You may want to be careful to always connect your drives in the same order and into the same USB ports.
And/or assign each drive a fixed drive letter.
Oh and another tip:
when buying another drive, stay away from drives which advertise their low power consumption. Those drives will spin down themselves very aggressively.
This may lead in the best case to delays when navigating your library
and in the worst case to ever-repeating ‘unavailable’ messages when trying to access your media.
To add to what Otto said, do not waste money by getting a “high speed” drive. For video just about any reasonable spin or read/write speed is fine Video is not really a disk intensive operation except for some video editing functions which Plex does not do.
One of the first things I do for all drives I get for use with Plex is turn off all sleep and “spin down” functions for the drive. To be always available disks serving Plex and the server itself really should never sleep or hibernate or spin down. For me any small savings in electricity or wear (and I believe wear is actually increased by sleep and other like functions for drives) are unimportant when set against the availability and stability of my Plex system.
@Elijah_Baley said:
One of the first things I do for all drives I get for use with Plex is turn off all sleep and “spin down” functions for the drive.
The sad thing about that is: there are now drives in the market which you cannot configure anymore in this regard (unless you hack their firmware).
@OttoKerner said:
@Elijah_Baley said:
One of the first things I do for all drives I get for use with Plex is turn off all sleep and “spin down” functions for the drive.The sad thing about that is: there are now drives in the market which you cannot configure anymore in this regard (unless you hack their firmware).
Yeah. Manufacturers are removing more and more options from drives and most other things. Like there are now USB drives that cannot be removed from their enclosures and work in a computer. I researched that a bit, after running into one and found that it does not even save the manufacturers any money. It just means that if the USB adapter part fails the whole drive becomes useless.
Thanks for the tips. I am going to get another external HD and will give it a shot. Many thanks!
Hi again. Sorry for the delayed reply, but have been doing some research and shopping and here is what I’m thinking of doing:
Current set up:
Mac Mini
Seagate 2 TB drive (music library)
Seagate 2 TB drive (PLEX movie library) - currently full
Western Digital MyBook 6 TB drive (Time Machine Back Up).
New configuration
Mac Mini
Seagate 2 TB drive (music library) - no change
Seagate 2 TB drive (PLEX movie library) - no change
Western Digital MyBook 6 TB drive (Move all back up files to new G-Drive and wipe clean to use as expansion storage for PLEX movie library)
G-Drive 10 TB drive (Time Machine Back Up)
Thoughts??
