I have a Media Server it has 1 M.2 (OS) and (4) 8TB Hard Drives for data. (currently using 8 TB of that in actual data)
I have on really old computer for backup which just has an OS drive and (4) 8TB Hard Drives - JUST to back up the media server.
Unfortunately, the old one just died, and now I am trying to determine what to do next. I am wondering what everyone else thinks.
Options
1 - Buy a new 8 Port Raid Card (any suggestions on a card for windows 10?) and and all 8 drives to a single solution.
Pros - Storage would then be upto 64 TB not counting parity.
- It would be faster (a bit), but I don’t really need that
Cons - 8 Port Raid card would be expensive ~$400 (not concerned about that really but still)
- I would need a new case, and my Media Server case only has 4 slots for drives (already used)
- would require I move all the data to a local backup then move again when the raid is set up
2 - Buy a (4) bay external storage cage what would be a new local backup
Pros - Always good to have a local backup copy, although,
everything is on the web with crashplan (although downloading would be painful)
cons - Do I really need it?
3 buy an (8) Bay External Storage Cage and move all the disk there and have none in the server itself.
Pros - Everything in one place, no need to upgrade for a really really long time (64 TB)
cons - they are kindof expensive
- no local backup copy
- it would be slower - maybe… I could connect it with USB 3.1 Type C.
while I know the max possible speed for transfers, what does anyone have actual speed test with plex?
any recommendation on an enclosure? raid card? remember, this is Windows 10? Thoughts?
I also have a Rocket Raid SAS card and a couple breakout cables. The card was $100 or so. I repurposed a mini-itx mobo and cpu.
All in all, it does its job. Rocket Raid is not so great. For instance, I could not get all drives to show up in windows in JBOD to use storage spaces. This was a version limitation of the card according to their support. But, oh well.
I recently started using StableBit DrivePool so I could use a poor man’s SSD cache. It works nicely and I am pretty happy with it.
I am a fan of Drobo, but they do not have any 8-bay solutions that are reasonable, I think.
Synology makes good stuff. I have the RS816 with RX415 expansion unit now attached to my server via iSCSI. The interface is nice, but I haven’t played with any add-ins with this particular use case.
Expect to spend some serious coin if 4K is on your radar and you are going to use a NAS to run Plex Media Server on. None of the low end models aren’t going to have enough CPU if you use clients that require transcoding. And only the extreme high end models are going to be able to handle it. I have one with a passmark score of just over 5K and won’t be taking the dive into the 4K deep end with it.
There are models out there with better CPU’s on them, but they are going to be considerably more expensive than my own, and $1300 for the empty 4-bay NAS. Some models are going to be in the $2K+ range, depending on the bays you want/need.
