Just a general question whether this is even possible.
I have several JBOD HDD cases attached to my windows computer, where Plex is installed on as well. As I will soon run out of drive letters (e.g. C: D: E: etc.) I was wondering if it’s even possible to tell the Media Server to recognize drive paths.
From what I’ve found on the internet the only option to add more HDDs/SSDs after every letter is taken, is to have folder paths or some sort of mapping, which I didn’t understand entirely.
Prior to buying a new 8-bay I would just like to know whether there’s the option to have Plex recognize HDDs if they’re not assigned to a network or a specific hard disk drive letter? That’s actually all I need to know
Any help or somebody with a similar setup giving some advice would be highly appreciated! Have a great day guys!
When you add a new disk to Windows you can either give it a drive letter or mount it in a folder on an existing disk. So you could, for example, add a disk just for TV and mount it to c:\TV. As far as Plex is concerned it’ll just be another folder and should work just the same as adding any other folder on a drive.
Woah there! That was quick and answered my question perfectly - thanks man!
And it also clarified the situation for me with the drive letter windows chaos Thank you man, looking forward to let my library grow then Have a nice day!
I am not using it personally. As I understand it, you can flexibly assign physical drives to be used as either JBOD, Mirror or (kinda) RAID.
So you can have a part of your data heavily secured/duplicated and other parts not so much.
Second the Drivepool recommendation. I have over 200TB in one right now (90 used so far) and haven’t had any problems.
Natively, Drivepool supports duplication (copies of files/folders) at either the entire pool level or individual directories.
If you add the (free) program SnapRaid to the mix, you can get a Raid 5-ish implementation, but it’s not real-time. You have to run “syncs” every so often to get new files added to the parity array. So far I haven’t had a drive die to test restoring, but the syncs and everything are pretty to get setup the first time.
I just checked their website and it seems pretty cool indeed. Just for my interest: As this will restructure my current setup, will I need to restructure my Plex libraries as well? With several k items this would be a bit of a pain in the a. Or is there a way to keep the existing libraries and still use stablebit?
You can keep the same libraries. What you’ll do is add the new single pool drive directory to the Plex library and let it scan. It’ll see the same items that you currently have and pick them up as duplicate files. (Make sure to turn off “empty trash”). Then you remove the old location after that scan is complete.
I recently made the transition with about 3500 movies and the scan took overnight. Only had to manually match about a dozen films that didn’t get recognized.
Thank you once again sir! Does the tool come with any side-effects? I’m thinking about having everything in one pool now already, as this really sounds quite juicy!
How does the structure of the drives look afterwards? Is this like
E:/movies/all movies
E:/shows/all shows
then or are they all still divided into the drives they’re originated from? If you wouldn’t mind I’d love to see a screenshot, but only if you have some spare time!
You can actually create as many pools as you want.
So depending on how much organising you want to do you can confine TV shows to any number of hard drives and then they will appear under one drive letter. The same with Movies.
I actually went a step further and had separate pools for
TV Shows - Active
TV Shows - Ended
Documentaries
Movies
4K HDR Movies.
Those drives were simply lettered as D: E: F: G: and H:
The individual drives making up all the pools can safely be removes as you no longer need to access them and it helps to keep Explorer clutter free. (If you really do want access to the individual drives it’s still doable.)
Another option is simply to create one huge pool. I just prefer to have different media types limited to certain drives.
DrivePool is awesome and still the best bang for buck software I have ever purchased in my years with Windows. Its not flashy but it just does it’s job. But that’s not to say it isn’t highly configurable.
Plus a 30 day fully functional trial.
Sadly my system is down at the moment so can’t currently give you anything in screenshots.
Basically though any pool you create will have its own drive letter.
Any drive that participates on those pools can have the letter removed.
Hey mate, thank you for that information. I instantly went ahead and installed the free version. However, I already came across a few issues with it. The technical one would be, that Drivepool seems not to recognize a few of my hard drives. As far as I saw the ones I have disassembled from other hard cases and wrapped up in a new external HDD case. Is there any way you could think of recognizing them? (without having them to put to a new case or similar?)
The other one is, that I will need to have everything physically copied into the pool, amirite? As I have several hundreds of TB, this would be quite too much for me to take and do Can I somehow make it recognize the already existing folders in the new pool without having to copy all the tons?
So you say I would need to have it formatted as NTFS prior to adding it to the pool right? What a shame. This seems like too much work for just more simplicity in organization. I would need to move 5 HDDs to other HDDs, re-format them and then adding the files back to it. Not talking about the manual copying to the Stablebit pool afterwards. That’s a bummer and I think I will just stick to the solution Krazeh provided in the first place, if the new 8-bay comes But thank all of you for your good ideas and guides! <3
Yeah you would need to format with NTFS. I thinks DrivePool only does NTFS and ReFS.
To be fair though it should be two days maximum. And that’s assuming they are high capacity (8TB+) drives.
From there though you are done. Drivepool needs nothing other than drag and dropping all your existing data inside a hidden folder it creates on each drive. There is no further copying involved.
I do understand though if you are limited for time.
Yeah that’s the point, I work 45hrs/week and my 2nd baby was born a week ago. I don’t have the time, but mainly the patience to copy 5x8TB back and forth And don’t forget the regular Plex traffic. The libraries will update or I would need to shut down Plex for this copying, which I wouldn’t like to do either.
I like the idea a lot of having everything in a single pool, but atm it’s just not applicable for me, even though I might consider it again when I have more time (Like in 8-12 years xD jk). Thanks though for all your suggestions! I don’t mind doing it the first solution provided anyways, it’s not as clean but easier applicable atm for me
Thank you man, looking forward to let my library grow then 
Have a nice day!
Does the tool come with any side-effects? I’m thinking about having everything in one pool now already, as this really sounds quite juicy!
But thank all of you for your good ideas and guides! <3