High Density SSD's

fullvietFX

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 1, 2004
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Is there any news on whether we'll be getting 6TB/8TB SSD's this year? None of these HTPC cases seem to be coming out with an option to mount 3.5" drives anymore.
 
Who keeps the media stored on the HTPC these days anyway? I have a 500GB SSD in my HTPC, but all my media (15TB+) is stored on my NAS and streamed to my HTPC using Plex.
 
I like to keep it all in once box, and those cases that allow 3.5" are too large for me. I've never used a NAS before either, maybe it's time I look into one.
 
Well my NAS is technically just a computer in a Fractal Define R5 with a 10c/20t Xeon and 6 3TB drives, 1 8TB drive and a 500GB SSD. Running Windows w/ Plex Media Server running. My HTPC is a Fractal Node 605 w/ Sandy Bridge quad core and 500GB SSD.

The benefit of having my media stored on a dedicated computer is the fact that I can upgrade and expand the storage easily and using Plex I can stream the media to pretty much anything (phones, computers, roku, firestick, etc..)
 
Well, since you are looking for 6/8TB SSD's, then money is probably not a problem. Here is a great deal on a Samsung PM1643 30TB SSD, just under 12K US$. For an enterprise SAS drive like that, it is a steal (Seriously!)
 
Well, since you are looking for 6/8TB SSD's, then money is probably not a problem. Here is a great deal on a Samsung PM1643 30TB SSD, just under 12K US$. For an enterprise SAS drive like that, it is a steal (Seriously!)

That's definitely over budget. I want to pay absolute $1500 max for one drive.
 
How much logical space do you need for your media, how much physical space do you have in the case, and how many SATA plugs does your mobo have?

Since the Samsung QVO 4TB drives are basically 1.8" boards, you could shuck and mount 4-6 of them in a 3.5" mounting bracket if density was your goal and money did not matter.
 
I would go the nas route, i would suggest to look into something like Synology DiskStation DS218+ and 2x 8TB hdds and set them up in raid 1, and place it where you have a wired connection to your router/switch, setup the share folders.

If you dont want to go the nas route, and you have 2 sata ports available, raid 0 2x Samsung QVO 4TB.
 
I want to avoid RAID. I have one drive for television/music and one drive for movies. I think having a NAS would be waste since nobody views media on my gaming machines. I currently have two 3.5" that are 4TB but they are running out of space and I want to move my HTPC into a smaller case.
 
I want to avoid RAID. I have one drive for television/music and one drive for movies. I think having a NAS would be waste since nobody views media on my gaming machines. I currently have two 3.5" that are 4TB but they are running out of space and I want to move my HTPC into a smaller case.

I'm sorry -- this sounds like "I'd like to avoid data redundancy and keep all of my eggs in one basket".

You can buy 3.5" hdd's that are 12TB, why not just replace your 4TB drives with these?

Alternately, you can buy 5TB laptop (2.5") hdds.

Why spend the extra scratch on ssds?
 
I want to own large capacity solid SSD drives but even 2TB drives are expensive would really like 4TB drives but I would want two of them. These HGST helium drives make a popcorn sound driving me nuts already.

I do own 1TB SSD drives but I would have to uninstall a bunch of games that I haven't had time to get around to.l
 
Who keeps the media stored on the HTPC these days anyway? I have a 500GB SSD in my HTPC, but all my media (15TB+) is stored on my NAS and streamed to my HTPC using Plex.

Archaeologists ?



Relics from an ancient time.
 
Well my NAS is technically just a computer in a Fractal Define R5 with a 10c/20t Xeon and 6 3TB drives, 1 8TB drive and a 500GB SSD. Running Windows w/ Plex Media Server running. My HTPC is a Fractal Node 605 w/ Sandy Bridge quad core and 500GB SSD.

The benefit of having my media stored on a dedicated computer is the fact that I can upgrade and expand the storage easily and using Plex I can stream the media to pretty much anything (phones, computers, roku, firestick, etc..)

Do you need that much horsepower? 10c/20t seems like overkill, still awesome though.
 
Yes for the PMS server. I also use the idle cores for running BOINC projects when they're not in use. PMS transcoding can really beat down a CPU.
 
Just seems unnecessary to have two machines. My HTPC never turns off.
You really are better off with a simple NAS. A single bay Synology NAS will use ~10W when the disk is being accessed and ~5W idle (or ~$7 annually if idle 50% of the time). For media streaming, there is zero difference between a hard drive and SSD, so, if you get an 8TB drive + a Synology DS119j, you are looking at ~$300. Nearly $1000 less than the SSD. It's just not worth getting for what you'd be doing with it. Even if you got a 14TB drive, it would still be considerably cheaper.

Alternatively a lot of consumer routers have NAS functionality. If yours does, just plug in a USB drive to that. 8TB externals can be had for ~$150.
 
You really are better off with a simple NAS. A single bay Synology NAS will use ~10W when the disk is being accessed and ~5W idle (or ~$7 annually if idle 50% of the time). For media streaming, there is zero difference between a hard drive and SSD, so, if you get an 8TB drive + a Synology DS119j, you are looking at ~$300. Nearly $1000 less than the SSD. It's just not worth getting for what you'd be doing with it. Even if you got a 14TB drive, it would still be considerably cheaper.

Alternatively a lot of consumer routers have NAS functionality. If yours does, just plug in a USB drive to that. 8TB externals can be had for ~$150.

Awesome, thanks man. I'll probably save myself a ton of money and go NAS route then. Only annoying thing is having music files on NAS might be annoying since it takes a little bit of time to access. Maybe I'll store all my music locally.
 
Awesome, thanks man. I'll probably save myself a ton of money and go NAS route then. Only annoying thing is having music files on NAS might be annoying since it takes a little bit of time to access. Maybe I'll store all my music locally.
I doubt you will notice any delay streaming music either, but that's up to you. 2.5" hard drives are cheap and can be had up to 5TB capacities.
 
I have six disks of parity in my 30 drive array (3 vdevs each at Z2 -- zfs is a bit different than RAID).

RAID 1 is costly in terms of space but provides insurance against 1x drive failure and a depreciating return on additional drive failures based upon the size of the array. I wouldn't use it, personally, but know some people who have without issue.
 
I have a two-bay NAS in RAID 1 for backups and archival, and a four-bay NAS in RAID 5 as media storage and streamer. Not having my backups guarded against HD failure would be kind of self-defeating. If the media storage failed I wouldn't lose data, I could re-rip everything from my DVDs and Blu-Rays, but I would lose a lot of time to do all that over again.
 
I just grabbed 4x WD Blue 2TB m.2 drives and a 4-way adapter (one of those startech inventions). Thinking about putting 3x of these setups into a 1U short-depth case and consolidating my NAS down a bit (I really have no use for the 100TB current iteration ;p); that would give me 10x drives in Z2 and mirrored os drives all with the onboard sata ports (no hba needed).

Lol, if this works out you may see 30x 4TB seagate spinners show up on the FS/FT forum :D
 
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Everyone running their NAS with RAID1?

If you have two drives, sure. Even if you have four and you need performance (a striped mirror). But you don't need that for media.

But seriously, just grab two larger spinners and toss those in a mirror in your HTPC and you're basically done.
 
Everyone running their NAS with RAID1?

I have a Qnap TS-873 with 8 gigs of ram and a GTX1030 for hardware transcoding 4k and 8x8tb drives running Raid 5. Absolutely love it. I can't wait till large capacity SSDs become realistic and more cost effective.
 
I have a Qnap TS-873 with 8 gigs of ram and a GTX1030 for hardware transcoding 4k and 8x8tb drives running Raid 5. Absolutely love it. I can't wait till large capacity SSDs become realistic and more cost effective.

This encodes the video before streaming it to the display device I'm assuming?
 
I have a Qnap TS-873 with 8 gigs of ram and a GTX1030 for hardware transcoding 4k and 8x8tb drives running Raid 5. Absolutely love it. I can't wait till large capacity SSDs become realistic and more cost effective.
IIRC the 1030 dont have any encoders, but maybe does have decoders, so you use the GT1030 to decode and CPU to transcode?
 
Encode/decode/transcode I'm not sure what word to use but I meant that basically the NAS does all the hard-work before sending it off.
 
That depends on the software you use. For example: Plex will either direct play or transcode as needed based upon the source (file) resolution and other components and the display resolution. If necessary, all of that work is done by the NAS.
 
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