Ideas for storage on my Plex server/HTPC

[Makeroflostsouls]

So right now I have a rack mounted 12 bay hot swap case with , 3x3tb drives a 1.5tb and a 1tb drive. 256gb ssd for OS (win10 64bit). Has a Msi z87-g45 MB, 4690k cpu, 8 gigs of ram. It's currently running drive pool. Which works great. I have 464 blu-rays loaded on my server currently . Now I have most of the blu-rays boxed up in storage. So if a drive was to fail I wouldn't cry to much. Just takes days if not a week to load them back on a new drive (huge pain in the ass). So I was looking at picking up a few on the 8tb WD drives that go on sale at BestBuy for 169.99 here lately. I would like to get up to at least 30tb of use able storage. Also like to go raid so I don't have to reload all my movies if a drive was to fail. Need to keep windows 10 on this machine as It's also my HTPC I use for play back in my theater. Which I run Kodi for the front end. Ideas on raid ? soft ware or hard ware raid? This is also a Machine that's on 24/7. Thanks

 

[WestSidaz]

Read about snapraid ^^ Runs in Win.. dosnt spin all hdds at once = dosnt eat that much energy and has raid features.. well.. read about it and decide yourself ^^

 

[rhansen5_99]

I would check out a Windows storage space with 4 8tb reds. Unless you need more than 150MB\s you should be fine with just a spanned drive. Note a good 1080p stream can maybe hit 15Mb\s. Also if you can keep your Plex server and transcode stuff on your SSD. Just my 2c and make sure to fully test the drives before you go mission critical.

I missed your redundancy questions, you can setup your existing 11tb as a partial recovery pool or maybe get more of the 8tb reds. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.windowscentral.com/how-use-storage-spaces-windows-10?amp

 

[RFOneWatt]

Sounds like you are on the right track with Stablebit DrivePool. Just add Stablebit Scanner to your system and you'll almost certainly be fine.

Since you have physical copies of your media I wouldn't waste the hard drives - I would just rely on duplication along with Scanner to keep my data safe.

When I was building my storage servers I was considering both unRAID and SNAPRAID but having had such good luck w/ the DrivePool / Scanner combination I've never really considered changing.

Scanner has always caught any suspect drives way, way before they ever failed. I've never lost any data.

I use a combination of HighPoint and LSI myself. Highpoint is relatively cheap, fast & works well but they were rather quirky during setup. Once I got them sorted though it's been smooth sailing.

Good luck with whatever you do though!!

~RF