Folks,
What sort of drives are you using to store your Plex libraries? I have been using SSHDs for cost/capacity/performance balance but i’m at a point where I need to expaind and SSHDs are getting costly and difficult to find.
What sort of drives do you use? Does it matter? I find most NAS-rated drives have a rotational speed of 5900RPM. For those of you who use them do you find the rotational speed problematic? Do you stick to 7200RPM drives?
Thanks,
meadcd
The WD / HGST Pro series NAS drives are all 7200 RPM.
If you’re running a NAS, with the transcoding directories and PMS’s library on the NAS, 7200 rpm is of benefit provided PMS is running on the NAS. If it’s over the net to you, 5400 - 7200 won’ t make any difference because of the inherent latency of the network read request.
I simply have a bunch of USB external drives (currently 11, a mixture of 3, 4, 5 and 6 TB) totaling 50 TB. They are all attached to a single computer and I run StableBit’s DrivePool to combine all the drives into one. I also use the duplication feature, where selected directories are duplicated but no file is stored twice on the same actual drive. Basically through that I have most of the advantages of Raid but all the files are stored in readable format so that if the computer hosting the drives fails I can access all the stored files by simply attaching the drives to another computer.
As far as speed goes it is unimportant as streaming video or audio is not demanding at all. I select drives based on size, price per TB and reliability. I do not seem to have bought anything other than Seagate or Western Digital drives in a long time. I find that all drive companies have overall about the same reliability and I have not had but one drive fail in the last eight or so years. (Of course not all my drives are that old)
If I were buying internal drives I would get ones that are designed to be on all the time but speed would not matter. Drives labeled as NAS are usually good choices.
BTW: I do take pains to avoid buying several drives at once that could be from the same lot. That way I do not get too bad a hit if a manufacturer has a bad run.
BTW2: I make absolutely sure that any drive I get can have its “sleep” or “hibernate” or “spin down” functionality turned off as I really see no advantage to that and it can cause access problems for programs like Plex.
Thank you both, this is helpful - Chuck, I was considering a NAS device, not to run PMS but to use as storage. My PMS is currently an Intel NUC device. I hadn’t considered using multiple devices in the way Elijah is doing - this is clever!
I appreciate the input
There are way too many ways to solve your question 
It comes down to personal preference on how you’d like to manage your media…
Some go for NAS, some go for discretes. I prefer the NAS because if a drive fails, it’s not a big deal. i’m not left scampering to figure out what was lost and then re-rip it from the media but NAS comes at a price. Full control? Maximum storage? Maximum reliability? What can the wallet handle?
@meadcd said:
My PMS is currently an Intel NUC device.
I have a NUC Skull and a Shield TV pro as PMS - and my storage is a Synology NAS.
Works well for me
The NAS can serve Plex if I wish so it is yet another backup server.
