That’s pretty cool, @ChuckPa. Looks nice and clean.
I mean for reference Im running my plex server on an old 5th or 6th gen laptop with a GT 980m mobile GPU.
Not exactly well optimized. All I know is that I can have my movie on both a USB 2.0 drive and a USB 3.0 connected HDD, and it takes about 6 seconds longer on the HDD than the SSD because it has to spin up (I can hear it doing this).
If the HDD is spun up, I agree there should be no issue. I’ve tested this by having the disk spun up by modifying a file just before playing, and its only about 4 seconds. My argument was never than an HDD wasn’t fast enough, or that the transfer speed had anything to do with it.
Now that I know it’s actually healthier to have the drive spinning 24/7, that is the new goal.
Why do you have your drives spin down? Do you realize you’re doing more damage / wear-and-tear on them by power cycling? (thermal expansion & contraction as temps change does the most damage)
If the drives get that warm, get a vented enclosure (Vantec makes a really nice USB3 enclosure which is fan vented and keeps even a 7200 RPM drive cool)
Lol… You are sometimes a little late to the party Chuck… The OP literally stated he is now aware of this 2 hours ago…
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I think people tend to end up choosing a solution that they are both comfortable with, and also based on previous experience.
I for one, have had and continue to have atrocious experience with legacy RAID5 systems. One of the biggest problems I have found is the abysmal write speeds that are the result of the controller having to calculate the parity before allowing more data to flow.
The read speeds on RAID5 are great, but the writes are hideous!
In regards to RAID10, indeed if you are unlucky enough to lose the WRONG 2 drives, you have had it. But if you are lucky enough to lose the RIGHT 2 drives, you’re still rockin’.
I also like RAID10 because of the performance gains to be had.
Obviously it’s a 4 drive minimum for RAID10, and at that point you get 4x read and 2x write speed gains. But when you start moving up to 6 drives in a RAID10, you get 6x read and 3x write speed gain. But go to 8 drives in a RAID10, you get 8x read and 4x write speed gain.
I’ve recently had the privilege of being able to build one of these commercially, using Near Line SAS drives, and holy Hell did it rock!
Anyone who knows a thing or 2 should label their drives appropriately, and any decent RAID controller worth its money, should be able to correctly identify a failing / failed drive. This is certainly the case for enterprise gear.
And lastly, as I said earlier, I really need to have a read on RAID6, and maybe RAID60, to see what they’re all about
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HW RAID6 consisting of 16 spindles
The following measurements were conducted while libraries are being added to a new PMS instance. It is hammering the storage array with reads processing the intro detections of 10,000+ TV episodes and video chapter thumbnail creation of 3000 film titles.
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 3634 MB in 3.00 seconds = 1210.89 MB/sec
$ dd if=/mnt/REDACTED/REDACTED.mkv of=/dev/null bs=4M status=progress
65800241152 bytes (66 GB, 61 GiB) copied, 36 s, 1.8 GB/s
15922+1 records in
15922+1 records out
66783295151 bytes (67 GB, 62 GiB) copied, 36.5898 s, 1.8 GB/s
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/REDACTED/test.mkv bs=4M count=12800 status=progress
52709818368 bytes (53 GB, 49 GiB) copied, 24 s, 2.2 GB/s
12800+0 records in
12800+0 records out
53687091200 bytes (54 GB, 50 GiB) copied, 24.4488 s, 2.2 GB/sReading from my array
[chuck@glockner REDACTED.2005]$ dd if=REDACTED.mkv of=/dev/null bs=4M
13836+1 records in
13836+1 records out
58035032218 bytes (58 GB, 54 GiB) copied, 26.7462 s, 2.2 GB/s
[chuck@glockner REDACTED.2006]$
RAID6 has a much greater write penalty than RAID5. I would imagine if I had built my array as RAID5 the numbers would be even higher. At idle my reads from my RAID6 array is about 2800-2900MB/s and writes averaging 2500-2600MB/s.
Gee, I feel so boring & cheap. I have a Ubuntu PC w/ a ext4 formatted 7TB HD for movies. Ext4 filesystems write data in such a way defragging isn’t necessary. I rsync it to a USB mounted 7TB HD at the beginning of every month for a backup. I guess I dont want to pay for electricity to spin 10 HDs 24/7, especially when Im only viewing movies in the evening for 2-4 hours / day. Average movie start time is 2-3 seconds, Direct Play enabled. It works for me.
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Lol… Ahhh… Nope! Lol…
Although on a serious note… As much as I wouldn’t mind working for Plex, the grief that you guys sometimes get is all too much for me 
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