Posted April 12, 2020 Morning all, I had questions about RAID and redundancy. Sorry if this has been asked before. First off, setup: I7-3770, P8Z77-V LK Asus Motherboard, 8GB DDR3, GTX 1660 Super, 3x8TB Seagate drives(not NAS rated) 1x5TB Seagate Drive, 240GB Kingston SSD. Use of setup: Only running Plex and a file server-DNLA(in case i want to transfer uncompressed movie/show files to phone, I do this often). 1x8TB holds all my media. 1x8TB is blank, 1x8TB is an external drive that I backup manually with my media drive( would love to automate this). 1x5Tb is used for downloading media and converting if necessary so i do not bottleneck/wear out media drive needlessly. SSD is for OS(WIN 10 PRO) Plex Metadata is also saved on this. Want: In the end of all this i would like to have a Raid 1 or something similar to automatically backup my media drive( I would like Raid 1 just for the speed benefits of downloading media off of it more quickly). As well as having my current 8TB external drive backup automatically( I do not want Seagates tiered backup file system, I just want the current file backed up to look exactly like my Media drive.) Question: I have heard and seen on this forum that a lot of people tend to steer away from RAID due to issues with motherboard compatibility and or errors that cause the drive to be useless. What is your guys thoughts? I am just tired of manually backup up drives. I am currently trying to use Software Mirror via Disk MGMT and it is currently at 45% Resyncing the 2x8TB drive (they were freshly formatted before mirror started). Is this the best option for what I have? A lot of people i have seen steered away from motherboard RAID, just because if the motherboard died you might be in deep shit. P:S: If i had all my ducks in a row, I would like to have 4x8TB (or bigger ) 2 sets of raid 1. One pair for Movies and the second pair with TV shows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 12, 2020 Id use software raid here. Storage spaces is included in windows and will work well here. Don't use the disk management raid, its worse than storage spaces. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 12, 2020 Author Ok, i didn't even know about the "Storage spaces" application. I will try it out right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 12, 2020 Author Thanks so much for the recommendation on Storage spaces! I like that it is not requiring me to have them "sync" for days when i had absolutely no data on them ha! It worked right away! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 12, 2020 I'm fan of hardware RAID. I would suggest use it unless a RAID card can't be installed. Basically, HW RAID offloads storage operations from CPU. Using a software RAID such as Storage Spaces, MDAMD, ZFS, etc. you set CPU handle all storage IO. So the right CPU should be considered when you plan the performance of the storage subsystem and its resources left for others operations (OS, apps, services, servers). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 Author Once i upgrade to 4-8 new hard drives i will definitely go hardware route. I have an i7-3770 with nothing actually running on it mostly(Direct play a lot on Plex) so i am not too worried about a small CPU hit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 11 hours ago, jtaz16 said: GTX 1660 Super, Why have a GPU if it's just a Plex server? PS: You need to quote us for us to see replies. Make sure to quote or tag me (@JoostinOnline) or I won't see your response! PSU Tier List | The Real Reason Delidding Improves Temperatures | "2K" does not mean 2560×1440 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 Author Just now, JoostinOnline said: Why have a GPU if it's just a Plex server? PS: You need to quote us for us to see replies. Gotcha, Sorry. New to forums. I have the GPU in there for two reasons. 1.) I got it free from a Youtube streamer. 2.) It helps a lot with Live Transcoding especially with how slow my Upload speed is(15mbps). Via CPU it would take almost 40% for a 1080p bluray rip to transcode and it would buffer for quite a long time ~1min(if i had subtitles enabled even longer!). With the 1660 S and the Turing Nvenc encoder it can handle ~20 Transcodes at a time if i remember from my research. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 5 minutes ago, jtaz16 said: Gotcha, Sorry. New to forums. I have the GPU in there for two reasons. 1.) I got it free from a Youtube streamer. 2.) It helps a lot with Live Transcoding especially with how slow my Upload speed is(15mbps). Via CPU it would take almost 40% for a 1080p bluray rip to transcode and it would buffer for quite a long time ~1min(if i had subtitles enabled even longer!). With the 1660 S and the Turing Nvenc encoder it can handle ~20 Transcodes at a time if i remember from my research. I transcode 1080p just fine and my Plex server has an i5-2400. Make sure to quote or tag me (@JoostinOnline) or I won't see your response! PSU Tier List | The Real Reason Delidding Improves Temperatures | "2K" does not mean 2560×1440 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 Author 52 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said: I transcode 1080p just fine and my Plex server has an i5-2400. Usually with my Transcodes they go from 1080p 24mbps to 480p-720p 1-2mbps bitrate (To WAN). My experience that takes quite a bit of power. Original File and size: 31 Mbps stream Transcoding from Directly play to 720P 2Mbps stream, Again for outside use only would it ever transcode(except for external subtitles). It is pinned basically at 100% CPU. With a 4 core 8 Thread CPU. Transcoding via GPU instead. Almost instant start of streaming. and almost no hit on the CPU. GPU hit is 8 % for video encoding. So i could do that transcode about 9 times more until the CPU would have to step in. Almost all of my files are around this size and or larger with 4K. The Video decode is from me remoting into my plex server and looking at the Task Manager. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 3 minutes ago, jtaz16 said: Usually with my Transcodes they go from 1080p 24mbps to 480p-720p 1-2mbps bitrate (To WAN) My mistake, I didn't realize you were playing outside of your LAN. I see you did say that earlier, I'm just very sleepy. Make sure to quote or tag me (@JoostinOnline) or I won't see your response! PSU Tier List | The Real Reason Delidding Improves Temperatures | "2K" does not mean 2560×1440 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 (edited) Author 3 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said: My mistake, I didn't realize you were playing outside of your LAN. I see you did say that earlier, I'm just very sleepy. Not a problem! I limit my outside to 4Mbps per stream so that i could at least get 3 streams for my family going at a time. The big hits are my 4k edits that i haven't created a 1080p edit for. I am hoping to get my pfSense router working right and buying a Cable connection as well as my current DSL line to get around 40 Mbps combined. (I live pretty far from good services unfortunaly....but i have unlimited upload and download bandwidth!) Edited April 13, 2020 by jtaz16 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted April 13, 2020 Author 1 hour ago, JoostinOnline said: Why have a GPU if it's just a Plex server? PS: You need to quote us for us to see replies. Also I found this site that is really helpful for showing how many transcodes a GPU can handle. At the top you can change the conversion. Not sure about the sites trustworthiness due to my Pi-hole blocking it out of the box... https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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