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Is 5400rpm good enough for a home theater?

SherylinRM
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Go to solution Solved by Rohime,

5400RPM Greens will be OK if you are running independant drives (not RAID).

 

I would not recommend Greens though if you going to build a RAID array.   They seem to work OK these days, but have a bad reputation from days gone past (because greens are designed to power down on idle and RAID arrays don't cope so well with that).    Its why you now see "NAS Drives" like the WD Red to address this.

 

The time that 5400 Drives will become a problem is when you start getting 3+ users streaming HD from the same spindle.  Ie; if you have PLEX for example streaming to multiple TV's and Tablets, etc.     ( but if your HTPC is connected to just one TV then that's probably not a concern). 

 

BTW:  HTPC's are so "last century".   These days (for high volume media) the better approach is a build a NAS as a central Media server, and just use a ChromeCast or Shield or Roku3 or XBox or PS4 or something similiar to display on TV - ie: any $50-$100 playback device at each TV.   This approach also moves any PC noise out of the lounge room (you can put a NAS anywhere on the network).

Posted

A friend of mine has a huge collection of movies and wants to make a new home theater.

In order to help out I thought I would ask you wonderful people here.

 

Would 5400rpm green drives be fast enough to play blueray movies easily?

 

Also will they be fast enough to later play 4k movies in the future?

 

If so I could buy rather a lot of them for pretty cheap here.

If not that is fine as well because I want my friend to get a good system up and running :)

 

Thanks a lot for helping guys :)

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if you have to go for HDDs id suggest to get 72000 rpm ones if he can afford it ssds would be better 

I lurk a lot

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My WD GREEN 1 TB could handle 60 mbps sequential read which should be fast enough to play a Blu Ray movie.

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@peej

I see absolutely NO reason or advantage to going to terabytes of SSD's for playing a movie or listening to a song.

Sorry but your reply makes NO sense whatsoever.

 

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Just now, SherylinRM said:

@peej

I see absolutely NO reason or advantage to going to terabytes of SSD's for playing a movie or listening to a song.

Sorry but your reply makes NO sense whatsoever.

 

 

i just assumed you had alot of movies if you like me i have a plex sever thats 6tb and almost full granted there not SSDs but big capacity SSDs do perform better than small ones 

I lurk a lot

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@peej

My friend does have terabytes of movies [which I said].

And I still see no reason to spend thousand of dollars on SSD's to play a movie.

Just put the hard drives into a computer and bingo. Home theater.

His old one already runs his home but he wants a separate one for movies and such now.

 

Anyhow, the size of his collection still would not justify using SSD's that I can see anyhow.

 

 

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24 minutes ago, peej said:

if you have to go for HDDs id suggest to get 72000 rpm ones if he can afford it ssds would be better 

Since when were 72000 RPM drives a thing? xD 

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Posted
7 minutes ago, SherylinRM said:

@peej

My friend does have terabytes of movies [which I said].

And I still see no reason to spend thousand of dollars on SSD's to play a movie.

Just put the hard drives into a computer and bingo. Home theater.

His old one already runs his home but he wants a separate one for movies and such now.

 

Anyhow, the size of his collection still would not justify using SSD's that I can see anyhow.

 

 

 

well if he wants to move to 4k you need anywhere between 100Mb/s and 3Gb/s transfer rate to watch 4k video so 45GB an hour to 1.5TB and hour of data so yeah a 72rpm HDD can handle it im just saying if he had the cash to do it it would certainly hold up a lot longer. but im not saying to actually do it 72 rpm is fine 

I lurk a lot

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1 minute ago, Warning said:

Since when were 72000 RPM drives a thing? xD 

you know what i mean lol :P

I lurk a lot

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For sequentials 5400rpm is enough (big files = sequentials)

 

Just make sure to have something else (sd card for all i care) for the OS.

 

In case it's not an urgent build, linus has hinted a "budget 100tb nas" video that is probably gonna contain a lot of tips & tricks applicable for you, even when you arent going 100tb :P

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2 minutes ago, Warning said:

Since when were 72000 RPM drives a thing? xD 

Idunno man, maybe WD made new raptors that now require liquid cooling :P

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Ok so 5400rpm for anything up to blueray and 7200rpm for the new 4k's?

Is this correct?

 

As for the operating system they seriously just want to turn things on and watch movies or play music with this. Nothing else.

So their media player will be front and center 99.999% of the time.

Ok thanks everyone :)

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5400RPM Greens will be OK if you are running independant drives (not RAID).

 

I would not recommend Greens though if you going to build a RAID array.   They seem to work OK these days, but have a bad reputation from days gone past (because greens are designed to power down on idle and RAID arrays don't cope so well with that).    Its why you now see "NAS Drives" like the WD Red to address this.

 

The time that 5400 Drives will become a problem is when you start getting 3+ users streaming HD from the same spindle.  Ie; if you have PLEX for example streaming to multiple TV's and Tablets, etc.     ( but if your HTPC is connected to just one TV then that's probably not a concern). 

 

BTW:  HTPC's are so "last century".   These days (for high volume media) the better approach is a build a NAS as a central Media server, and just use a ChromeCast or Shield or Roku3 or XBox or PS4 or something similiar to display on TV - ie: any $50-$100 playback device at each TV.   This approach also moves any PC noise out of the lounge room (you can put a NAS anywhere on the network).

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@Rohime

 

No raids for him. JBOD's only.

I know this site is mostly for high end, latest greatest, pay too much and be happy crowd.

But sometimes people just want something that works :)

 

As for watching. Imagine a living room with a 6 foot TV and surround sound 7.1. Black out curtains and a small popcorn machine :)

That is it really.

 

I am not sure where people got the idea of a NAs though.

Wouldn't use anything but WD blacks for those myself :)

 

Ok well thanks a lot for your reply to my actual question :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2 minutes ago, SherylinRM said:

@Rohime

 

I am not sure where people got the idea of a NAs though.

Wouldn't use anything but WD blacks for those myself :)

 

 

But Blacks are too expensive .... actually Home NAS is *exactly* the market for WD RED.

 

NAS for media is real popular because software like PLEX absolutely ROCKS for media on every device type - and almost every device you can imagine has a Plex client.    ie: Plex server software running on NAS box - and clients everywhere.   I watched my media collection in Canada (on holidays) from my home NAS in Australia that way just a couple of months ago... (free hotel bandwidth - lolz).

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@Rohime

I suppose I should have mentioned this is not for me but a friend.

They can press a button but that is it.

They have no computer skills at all.

 

Ok then so Red it is for me :) and 5400rpm for my friend lol ;)

 

 

Thanks again :)

 

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