Plex Box Drive Options?

[GuruOfNothing]

I hope this fits here... (Go ahead, insert the joke here... I know you want to:-) If not, move it please...

 

This may amount to a really stupid question. I have a box dedicated to Plex and I am redoing all the drive setup that is in place. I am currently using a WD MyCloud as the storage drive because , well, that is what I had when I started combining all the other dinky drives that had my media on it. I have/had NO backup which I know is totally stupid and risky. Story of my life. This has changed.  I have a 500GB drive in the system for the OS. I just bought two 10TB Easystore drives and shucked them because they are WD Red;'s in plain white wrappers at considerably less cost than off the shelf Reds (I did it carefully and kept the housings BTW) The plan was to put them into the case, copy my entire library over to one drive and use the Manage function of Windows 7 Pro to do a drive stripe, which I assume creates a drive mirror on the second drive. Sound idea or total crap with SO much better of a way to do things? I am not in a place yet where I can afford a standalone NAS with all the drives to RAID.

[jake765111]

4 minutes ago, GuruOfNothing said:

I hope this fits here... (Go ahead, insert the joke here... I know you want to:-) If not, move it please...

 

This may amount to a really stupid question. I have a box dedicated to Plex and I am redoing all the drive setup that is in place. I am currently using a WD MyCloud as the storage drive because , well, that is what I had when I started combining all the other dinky drives that had my media on it. I have/had NO backup which I know is totally stupid and risky. Story of my life. This has changed.  I have a 500GB drive in the system for the OS. I just bought two 10TB Easystore drives and shucked them because they are WD Red;'s in plain white wrappers at considerably less cost than off the shelf Reds (I did it carefully and kept the housings BTW) The plan was to put them into the case, copy my entire library over to one drive and use the Manage function of Windows 7 Pro to do a drive stripe, which I assume creates a drive mirror on the second drive. Sound idea or total crap with SO much better of a way to do things? I am not in a place yet where I can afford a standalone NAS with all the drives to RAID.

I think your way would work but it is not the best way of doing things. 

Just to clarify -  You are running win7 pro - Your main goal is to upgrade to a bigger drive but keep all data, right?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Stripe is basically raid0, and the software raid in windows disk management, id upgrade to windows 10 so you can use storage spaces.

 

 

[GuruOfNothing]

4 hours ago, jake765111 said:

I think your way would work but it is not the best way of doing things. 

Just to clarify -  You are running win7 pro - Your main goal is to upgrade to a bigger drive but keep all data, right?

Yes. Win7 Pro. I am NOT planning on changing out the OS drive. All that is on that is the OS and Plex. I have wiped out everything else I could so there was bare bones stuff running. Putting the new shucked 10TB drives in was a two-fold change. The first part was to bring the media into the Plex box itself instead of having to bring the media from a network drive for encoding and then send it back across the network to the devices. I am trying to have some control over overall network traffic. The second part was to add an identical drive to the mix that would stay sync'd with the main media drive when changes were made so if the main drive crapped out, I had a copy. I had thought about pulling the 6TB drive out of my MyBook Cloud and putting the 10TB in so the data was backed up in a box outside of the Plex box enclosure but again... network traffic. I realize that using WD's non-NAS drive enclosures (MyBook and EasyStore) is very "consumer" and barely a solution for real data protection so I am trying to avoid the trap of just plugging in a bunch of external enclosures and running WD backup software.

 

I am not truly committed to any direction at this point so I am running this by everyone to see if there are better options that I should be implementing instead.

[GuruOfNothing]

Boy oh boy did I screw that explanation up. Sorry. I am not trying to "stripe" or Raid 0 that setup. I am looking for Raid 1 (mirror). I want a drive that the system uses for data access and a drive that is an EXACT copy of the original as a fail safe backup. I don't know if Win 7 Pro has that ability. If not, what would do that? OR... since I have fallen down the rabbit hole... Am I just better off to do regular backups of the main media drive to the second media drive and forget about the whole automatic thing altogether?

[jake765111]

10 hours ago, GuruOfNothing said:

Boy oh boy did I screw that explanation up. Sorry. I am not trying to "stripe" or Raid 0 that setup. I am looking for Raid 1 (mirror). I want a drive that the system uses for data access and a drive that is an EXACT copy of the original as a fail safe backup. I don't know if Win 7 Pro has that ability. If not, what would do that? OR... since I have fallen down the rabbit hole... Am I just better off to do regular backups of the main media drive to the second media drive and forget about the whole automatic thing altogether?

Ok. What if you use windows 7 backup and just backup the files you want to the drive. That will work automatically and you might be able to use that data in case of a drive fail. However, If you select to backup "c" (Your OS) The drive will probably not be bootable and you will probably have to manually move the files back onto the new drive if one of the drives ends up failing. (You basically trying to do raid one but you are saying it is too late for that correct?)

[GuruOfNothing]

Never too late! What I 'think' I am looking for is RAID 1 but the more I bang the concept around in my head, I am just looking for a backup to a critical, non-bootable drive and doing RAID anything is possibly overkill. Especially knowing myself and my propensity to do stupid file deletions that would prevent me from retrieving a file if it was actually on a mirrored volume. So, I am thinking that a simple backup solution is probably the best route to go. Just making it automatic so I can't forget to do it and botch things up.

[jake765111]

16 hours ago, GuruOfNothing said:

Never too late! What I 'think' I am looking for is RAID 1 but the more I bang the concept around in my head, I am just looking for a backup to a critical, non-bootable drive and doing RAID anything is possibly overkill. Especially knowing myself and my propensity to do stupid file deletions that would prevent me from retrieving a file if it was actually on a mirrored volume. So, I am thinking that a simple backup solution is probably the best route to go. Just making it automatic so I can't forget to do it and botch things up.

Sounds good. If you are running windows, it allows you to select folders to backup, and it works well. I hope I helped you out!

[GuruOfNothing]

Yes, thank you!