4 drive NAS setup for media storage(plex)

[cmdrdredd]

I have a 4 bay NAS box and 4 10TB WD Red NAS HDDs to go in it. I'm not sure if I should JBOD or what because I want maximum storage but everyone seems to say do RAID10 but I know I have more than 20TB of stuff to go on there. People talk about "if a drive goes bad" scenarios but I have HDDs that are over a decade old and still function as new. Not sure what to think at this point. All that's going on there is media for Plex. Nothing mission critical but on other forums I visit people make it seem like they are protecting bank information on their NAS with all the fear mongering of drive failures and losing data. I'm not storing anything there that I can't recover from another physical copy.

Just looking for suggestions.

 

[aigomorla]

any possibility of getting 1 more 10tb and going Raid Z or Raid 5?
That would give u 40TB with 1 failover.
IF that 1 drive failed, you would still run on a degraded array until you could replace that 1 drive.
The Odds they say of 2 drives failing at the same time from natural causes are very slim.... *knock on wood*
And Amazon prime next day is awesome to get you that drive fast so you could rebuild that array with very little downtime.

Also what is your NAS? are you going to be using FREENAS with the plex plugin?

 

[rchunter]

Assuming this is your only copy of the data I would at least have 1 parity drive bare minimum. Having to re download everything sucks. Ideal situation, buy a bigger chassis and run more drives.

 

[cmdrdredd]

any possibility of getting 1 more 10tb and going Raid Z or Raid 5?
That would give u 40TB with 1 failover.
IF that 1 drive failed, you would still run on a degraded array until you could replace that 1 drive.
The Odds they say of 2 drives failing at the same time from natural causes are very slim.... *knock on wood*
And Amazon prime next day is awesome to get you that drive fast so you could rebuild that array with very little downtime.

Also what is your NAS? are you going to be using FREENAS with the plex plugin?

No I’m running a terra master quad core 4bay NAS box with 4 of the above mentioned drives. I want to use what I have in the mean time and later on down the line replace my 3 NAS boxes with a single 8 bay or something like that. I run the plex server from my PC. Someone suggested to me to set the drives as single and that way I only lose whatever is on that drive if one goes down. That’s not a bad solution IMO to keep all 40TB available.

 

[EXCellR8]

not to thread jack but is FreeNAS w/ Plex plugin better than Linux w/ Plex app installed? I currently rebuilding a 4-bay NAS from scratch but I'm not settled on an OS.

+1 for Amazon Prime Day deals

 

[cmdrdredd]

not to thread jack but is FreeNAS w/ Plex plugin better than Linux w/ Plex app installed? I currently rebuilding a 4-bay NAS from scratch but I'm not settled on an OS.

+1 for Amazon Prime Day deals

I think using the plex server on a PC is a better solution if you need to do multiple transcoding streams at once. Is that what you mean?

 

[aigomorla]

not to thread jack but is FreeNAS w/ Plex plugin better than Linux w/ Plex app installed? I currently rebuilding a 4-bay NAS from scratch but I'm not settled on an OS.

+1 for Amazon Prime Day deals

Running plex in a dedicated server is a lot better and much easier to update.
However if your very familiar with FreeBSD language, also your running freenas, then it kills 2 birds with one stone, since freenas itself is pretty heavy on hardware reqs, like having a gignormous amount of ECC ram and some decient cpu prowess.

I use plex plugin on my freenas because I have freenas.
If i was using something like unraid, or nas4free, i would probably run it off my dedicated w2012r2 server.

 

[nerp]

If you've never had a drive die, you're long overdue. If you buy HDDs knowing that you're only going to get half the capacity from the beginning, it's OK. Then mirroring your stuff doesn't feel like wasted space. Especially when a drive DOES fail and you slide in its replacement and everything is fine.

 

[cmdrdredd]

If you've never had a drive die, you're long overdue. If you buy HDDs knowing that you're only going to get half the capacity from the beginning, it's OK. Then mirroring your stuff doesn't feel like wasted space. Especially when a drive DOES fail and you slide in its replacement and everything is fine.

I didn't say I never had a drive die, I said I have some drives that are much lower quality than WD Reds and they are over a decade old and still work fine. I've had a couple of the Seagate 1TB drives die before as well as the old IBM Deskstar drives also die. Point is, the likeliness of me having a drive that sits idle most of the time just up and die doesn't seem that high.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

What I know and what I prefer are the result of personal decisions I made after leaving my financial/IT work-life for retirement in 2000. I was motivated to provide some sort of household server, that would also allow installation of "server" software versions, like DBMSes. That in turn allowed me to teach these aspects of topics to others. But a simple peer-to-peer server, using either workstation Windows or server Windows, was inexpensive because I could use older parts as I upgraded to newer processors, chipsets, etc.

I've used RAID0 and RAID5. I've always had data backed up in some simple way, although the backup intervals were too far and few between. But since my server is not accessed by thousands of people simultaneously, there is a departure in the size of my investment, the number of disks, the lack in use of Xeon and Super-Micro server boards. And ultimately, the bottleneck as I see it resides with the speed of my local Ethernet LAN, or Gigabit. At that point, it would seem meaningless to open the storage bottleneck any wider with two dozen hard disks and $1,000 controllers.

And so I dispense with the idea of upper-tier hardware controllers with large DIMM buffers, PCI_E x8 bandwidth, as examples. I found a simple SuperMicro 8-port controller that only provide JBOD and ACHI, connecting SATA-III drives with the 8087 breakout cable and two plugs on the controller card for two cables. I think I spent about $110.

And I chose to put these drives into a software-managed drive-pool, with function provided for data-duplication/redundancy at the file and folder level. I cache the drives to a combination of RAM and SATA SSD drive-space, but at most this only brings full saturation to match the gigabit network speed.

I don't know if drivepool configurations can be implemented on NAS devices, but these NAS devices have their own operating system or there are open-source systems.

 

[EXCellR8]

I think using the plex server on a PC is a better solution if you need to do multiple transcoding streams at once. Is that what you mean?

Running plex in a dedicated server is a lot better and much easier to update.
However if your very familiar with FreeBSD language, also your running freenas, then it kills 2 birds with one stone, since freenas itself is pretty heavy on hardware reqs, like having a gignormous amount of ECC ram and some decient cpu prowess.

Okay thanks fellas, I don't have any experience with FreeNAS nor do I have very powerful hardware for this NAS so I'll stick with the Plex on a server.

 

[cmdrdredd]

What I know and what I prefer are the result of personal decisions I made after leaving my financial/IT work-life for retirement in 2000. I was motivated to provide some sort of household server, that would also allow installation of "server" software versions, like DBMSes. That in turn allowed me to teach these aspects of topics to others. But a simple peer-to-peer server, using either workstation Windows or server Windows, was inexpensive because I could use older parts as I upgraded to newer processors, chipsets, etc.

I've used RAID0 and RAID5. I've always had data backed up in some simple way, although the backup intervals were too far and few between. But since my server is not accessed by thousands of people simultaneously, there is a departure in the size of my investment, the number of disks, the lack in use of Xeon and Super-Micro server boards. And ultimately, the bottleneck as I see it resides with the speed of my local Ethernet LAN, or Gigabit. At that point, it would seem meaningless to open the storage bottleneck any wider with two dozen hard disks and $1,000 controllers.

And so I dispense with the idea of upper-tier hardware controllers with large DIMM buffers, PCI_E x8 bandwidth, as examples. I found a simple SuperMicro 8-port controller that only provide JBOD and ACHI, connecting SATA-III drives with the 8087 breakout cable and two plugs on the controller card for two cables. I think I spent about $110.

And I chose to put these drives into a software-managed drive-pool, with function provided for data-duplication/redundancy at the file and folder level. I cache the drives to a combination of RAM and SATA SSD drive-space, but at most this only brings full saturation to match the gigabit network speed.

I don't know if drivepool configurations can be implemented on NAS devices, but these NAS devices have their own operating system or there are open-source systems.

Well I ended up configuring each disk as single and that way I only really worry about the data on the individual drive and not collectively. This is working out well thus far but the transfer of multiple TBs of data is taking its sweet time. I can host the plex server from the NAS with its 2.4 GHz quad core Celeron and 4GB memory but I may still choose to host it from my pc because I can trancode more streams at once in theory. There is something to be said about taking that load off the pc so I don’t have to use resources when gaming etc. might look into that and see what I can do off the NAS box itself. If it can handle my load then I will go that way.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Okay thanks fellas, I don't have any experience with FreeNAS nor do I have very powerful hardware for this NAS so I'll stick with the Plex on a server.

As I mentioned above it depends on what you need plex to do. If you just need it to stream out the video for direct play and no transcoding then it doesn’t matter. If you need to transcode lossless audio to Dolby digital or stereo and scale resolution then you need more performance. UHD streams can take quite a bit of bandwidth but devices that support UHD will direct play those.

How many streams are you looking to host at once? Anything less than 5 at a time should be fine from most NAS boxes.

 

[rchunter]

Yeah most of my devices can direct play with plex. I was testing streaming saving private ryan UHD rip to my S9+ and the only thing it had to transcode was the audio.
My shield and vero 4k can direct play pretty much everything, including audio. Not a lot of transcoding going on though, I almost never stream with plex on my phone or ipad..