Plex Servers Hard Drives External versus Internal

[calarahil]

Hey I'm looking to start backing up my blu ray movies onto a hard drive so that I can play it over plex. Was curious if I could get any feedback in terms of where to start. I do have makemkv also to note I legally have purchased and own each movie. I'm debating whether I should use internal storage or if I could go for an external solution like WD CLOUD NAS drives. I would need to get in the range of 6-8 TB based on the movies that I do have. Any feedback would be very helpful and I thank you ahead of time. 

[System Error Message]

they dont have to be WD cloud NAS as even WD reds will do as well. The minimum you need is WD blue and seagate cheetahs. Old WD green that lets you modify firmware is also a good choice.

 

With external storage its best to get an internal drive and external enclosure seperate, but for best performance use internal drives.

With internal drives you could get 3 drives or more and set up raid 5 or raid 6 to give yourself performance + backup.

 

There are tricks to partition the hard drive for fast storage but that only works when you're using around 10% of the drive's capacity as the rest wont have as consistently fast speeds as the edge of the drive.

 

With plex source quality wont require any CPU to worry about but if you wish to transcode on the fly you will require 2000 pass mark for every 1080p stream. I've set up my own file server which is part of a GPGPU cluster and the main limiting factor for plex is disk speed, CPU and network. Use dedicated NICs to help CPU a bit.

 

For backing up use features that store changes to disk (all recent windows OS has this capability built in) for the external drives that you will use. This means that if you modify a file the changes are logged so that if you need to get the old version it is also stored. Otherwise having a disk for each time and multiple copies is expensive and tedious. Having at least 2 copies is good. Cloud is another backup source but that depends on if you are paying and how much you get for free. With cloud if the service goes (or your subscription stops) it is a problem.

[calarahil]

Hey I appreciate the response. I'm thinking about a solution as well I'm thinking about getting a MyCloud EX2 Ultra NAS diskless and then getting 2 drives and throwing them in and running them in raid so that I can run it without the computer running all the time and have it stream. Would this be a good solution? If all possible I would like to stay away from having hard drives attached inside my computer all the time. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Diskless-Cloud-Network-Attached-Storage/dp/B01AWH05KK/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_sims?ie=UTF8

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236344&cm_re=wd_red-_-22-236-344-_-Product