PLEX/home NAS setup

Abe_FX35

Commendable
Sep 28, 2016
108
0
1,690
Hello everyone,

I need some assistance, i have the idea in mind but need some steps and "blueprints" of how to go about this.

I have x4 Western digital RED NAS 4TB drives that are brand new and x1 6TB WD External drive, how would be the easiest way to go about setting them up in my gaming rig/NAS case, i am also going to pay for drive bender and set them up in a drivepool to use them ONLY for my plex media needs. Im relatively new at multiple hard drive setups and i have some questions and would love to hear some suggestions or feedback if im going about this the wrong way.

1) Just daisy up the cables and connect all 4 drives inside my case, connect sata and power, good to go ? (do i need to prepare the brand new drives in any way, format ?

2)Im going to use Drive bender, seems pretty good and simple and a better choice than RAID. (correct me if im wrong).

3) my current PLEX library is 6 TB how do i safely transition these files to the new drivepool without losing anything or making a rookie mistake, simple CUT and PASTE ?

4) i need to transfer the library to the new drives, have them safely backed up, have PLEX read from the new made plex drivepool and ofcourse try and not run into any big errors or mess ups/loss of data.

5) Cache drive ? i have a 128 GB SSD spare drive i could use for it.

My Rig specs:

i7 2600k 2nd gen
MOBO: ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3 LGA 1155
128gb SSD OS drive
(OLD 1.4 TB HDD)
16 GB ddr3 ram
EVGA GTX 1070 FTW
EVGA 750 PSU fully modual
Netgear Nighthawk AC1900
Windows 10
USB External WD 6TB (all PLEX media is stored here, almost out of space !)

Thank you all for your help and support. :??:😀
 
I have a reasonibally simillar setup except using FlexRaid instead of Drive Bender and using Kodi with shared DB/thumbs instead of Plex.

1) Assuming your motherbaord has enough ports then yeah it is just a matter of wiring up the drives. I have more drives then my mobo had SATA ports so I got an inexpensive Dell PERC 8 port "raid" card that was already flashed to be JBOD (just a bunch of drives)

2) From what I can tell Drive Bender does mirroring but not parity. Thus it sounds like a RAID 1+0 setup (thus if you have 4 4tb drives you have 8tb of storage with a mirroed second copy). If that is the case then your motherboard's raid controller will do this better then software for free.
I opted to use flexraid as I did not want to have 3+ hard drives for redundancy. I have a software raid, so I have 4 drives and 3 of them make up one pool, the 4th drive stores the parity information. Since we are talking about media files that are static once written, this is a great comprimise to allow me to have redundancy without needing as many hard drives or enterpise grade hard drives plus expensive raid card.
ADDED:
Using your 4 4tb drive setup, that means you would have 12 usable TB of storage, with 1 drive holding the parity information in case of a drive failure.
The pro to this is more drive space and less wear-tear on the drives. The con is that it will take a full day (maybee more) to rebuild the data, while with your RAID 1+0 it can rebuild in the background and in a couple hours.

3) Once you have your pool setup then yeah, just plug yoru external in and copy the media over

4) DOnt know what the actual question is here. Once files are transfered then you just need to point PLEX to the new drive folder

5) would not be a bad idea assuming drive is of decent quality.

Out of curriosity how many devices are you pushing PLEX to?
Do you need to transcode the movies to them for them to be able to play?

 
1) Each SATA has its OWN connector. There is no Daisy Chain. That is IDE (Up to 2 drives per cable) or SCSI (up to 15 per cable). There are Other Daisy Chain line options but those are on the Server end where they use SAS drives

2) Never heard of drive bender and I am someone who ALWAYS reccomened a hardware RAID. Few things. 1) Something happens to Windows (Software RAID), Motherboard (RAID on Motherboard (this is half hardware half software but a BIOS update can and almost always does wipe the RAID settings)), Your Drive Bender looks like a software type raid. So those all have issue. Rebuilding a software/motherboard RAID can be difficult at times. Using a RAID card makes it easy so long as it is a GOOD RAID card. If your card failes, you replace it with something similar, it can import your RAID. You upgrade to a new rig or build a machine just for Plex, all you do is move the RAID card with it and everything is there. You can't do that easily with other options. Not without backing up, making new software/motherboard raids, and then restoring the files.

3) Yes it would just a copy and paste and then just point the Plex Server to those new folders and let it reindex everything (Unless you make the drive letter of the new location the same as the old one then you should be good

4) Again if you make it the same drive letter (Turn off Plex service, change drive letter of current storage, change new one to old latter, then copy and past the whole drive to the new one then turn plex back on) and you should be good.

DO NOT CUT AND PASTE! COPY AND PASTE! as this will leave your old hard drive intact in case something goes wrong!

5) No don't worry about a cashe drive. They are kind of pointless for something as little as this.
 


Just an FYI, Parity is not just on "One" Drive. It is on all the drives. It takes up space on all of the drives for parity. If it was just on one drive, and that failed, there goes your parity. by having them on all drives, it doesn't matter what drive failed, it keeps going until it is replaced.
 
I would have to depend on where he is watching the video. IF it is on a land and everything is Gigabit, sure. If he has like less than 20Mbps upload on his internet and has a good RAID setup, you won't see a difference as read/write to the same drive, vs reading and then writing to a SSD won't make any difference.

I convert everything to .MP4 so that there is no transcoding needed period.
 


On a traditional RAID 5/6 setup that is completley correct.
On FlexRaid's software system on the hand, parity is NOT stored on your disks containing your data
FlexRaid treats your drives as JBOD, it just pools them and you can set one or more drives to store parity. Parity can also be set to be calculated on the fly or only scheduled. I opted for scheduling as I can handle loosing a week's worth of content vs the greatly increased wear/usage of on-the-fly parity.
 


Ah ok. Yeah I just don't trust any kind of Software based/motherboard based RAID. I have see way to many bad things happen.

Hardware RAID Controllers on the other hand just seem to get the job done better. My father-in-law has a Drobo with their Beyond RAID. I just don't trust that either. It just seems like its too easy to mess up. Yes these other options are probably simpler for the standard user but 100 bucks can get you a pretty kick ass RAID card for up to 8 drives. Now not all do JBOD but why would you buy a RAID controller for JBOD then VS Just getting a SATA Controller.

That is just me and my opinion though. Not trying to argue! haha
 


Your point is very valid. I would NEVER trust a software raid for anything doing lots of writes; a very bad idea for databases or anything "critical". Funny you mentioned Drobos, I have a coworker who abandoned Drobo due to too many drive failures.
For my uses a $100 investment in the PERC card and FlexRaid license gave me some redundancy with my existing drives and allowed for easy expansion. While going true hardware RAID 5 for my low priority, static media would have costed me almost $1000 in card + better hard drives.
 


Thank you for your information ! I typed a big response, on my cell phone instead of my desk top and lost the entire freakin message lol.

So my only concern now is the setup and to use either raid configuration through mobo OR software drive pool (drive bender, or flexraid or stablebit, crashplan etc....)

Im just overwhelmed by the options, the reason i chose drive bender was because it seems easy to setup, it offers "duplicates" spanned over many drives which im assuming is protection/parity ? also because it has a nice GUI and monitoring dashboard, i like that kind of stuff. I just want the best solution, for all the money i spent on these drives ! LOL but now im confused, because at first i was told raid 5 is the way to go, and then others mentioned easy software to pool all the drives together that wont be as complicated or problematic as some people say raid can be, also saying that if a drive fails raid will rebuild it but most likely stress a 2nd hard drive to death too because its rebuilding the lost data. So you can imagine to a noobie storage managment person like myself im not sure which pill to take the red or the blue lol. jk

We use Plex everyday almost all day, my PC/plex media server/ soon to be NAS is connected hardwired to my router, and connected to my OLED tv for entertainment purposes in the living room. We run plex on our phones, and 3 rokus. In addition i will probablu have 1-3 remote streams running at a time through friends and family once this is setup properly so i dont have to worry at night lol.

I have 6 TB of precious media that i want to keep for a life time and worked hard on collecting, let me kinda list out again in breif what im trying to get at .

1)Safely protect and move my media collection to the new drives regardless of it being raid or software drive pool. (if 1 drive fails i dont lose any data)

2) Ofcourse have everything run as smooth as possible, and also giving me space to expand and collect more media in the near future.

3) monitor my NAS and have a relatively simple GUI to monitor and control stuff from, even remotely when i get a new pc this one will become 100 percent dedicated NAS.

4)software VS traditional RAID (i was told raid was problematic, hard, and complicated at times for beginners, so this is why drive bender, flexraid etc... seemed to be a simpler solution for me than BIOS settings and such. I was also told traditional RAID will rebuild itself if 1 drive fails, but can stress the other drives during the rebuild process and cause another drive to fail :/ AND that would eat up most of my drive space, just because thats the way it is.

Once again i apologize for being so all over the place, but i just need to be SOLD on a method that i can handle with relative ease and be able to cover the things i mentioned above so i can start preparing the machine to be setup.

Thank you all 😀

 


Thank you for your response !

1) So what i gather is hardware raid is better for my setup, and you recommend it, how would i go about making this happen, im sorry to ask but i need to know steps in order to prep my pc without making a mistake and losing tons of data. Do i need to buy a raid card ? i have never ever setup or managed a raid in any form, software or hardware.

2) Ok so im gonna forget about the cash drive for now, probably fancy unnecessary stuff in my case.

3) dont cut and paste, copy, leaving my files as a backup on my 6 TB external then just unplug it and store it somewhere or add my 6 TB to the drive pool/raid ?

4) could you please recommend a raid card, i just spent a pretty penny on these drives, so i will have to see if i can get one of those right now, but the more i wait the higher the chance of this external 6 TB failing and i lose everything so this is why im kinda in a rush.

Thank you once again for all your support.
 


Yes i would love to help plex transcode even faster and lag free if i can, not sure how though. but i have a 128gb SSD not in use.
 


I have FIOS 150mb download and 150 mb upload.

Wait you converted your entire library to a format that requires no transcoding ? why have i not heard about this before, i take pride in large bluray rips that can be as big as 20 GB or more, would converting my entire library take years lol, and would it effect the quality, ive become a huge HD snob because of my beautiful OLED TV, and i cant imagine watching my videos that are not offering the best quality the rip can offer.
 
I'm just throwing this out there, but unless you get a LSi card or something with a good cache that is going to cost at least 100usd used, you're better off using software raid. I'd even argue that if you are not running a live DB or something with extreme random access, then software raid is better. MD Raid on Linux works well with today's CPU's and memory speeds. And yes, Windows software raid is or was notoriously bad.

Look a the pros and cons of software raid, it's hard to justify a hardware raid card with today's processing power, especially for home use (even less so for this specific application of). Of course if I use raid, I only use raid1, so that's that opinion of raid.
 


Thank you for your input. I might give the software a shot, it just seems easier, but you can imagine people have different opinions, and at this point im ready to just follow instructions and just do it and see what happens and see how i like it. I really dont have extra money right now for a controller card, i dont fully understand why i need a controller card when my motherboard has 5 sata connections. i think it really comes down to preference and im just trying to weigh the pros and cons of both and fit my needs as mentioned earlier so i can just feel safe my data is protected and i can continue growing my plex media collection. :bounce:
 


That is a super cheap box, if you want to look at external enclosure you can check out synology or qnap but anything less is cheap for a reason
 


For your needs of 4 drives you can use your motherboards raid controller.
You can have a RAID 10 setup (so you will have an 8tb array and exact mirror copy of that same 8tb for redundancy)
This can be set at the motherbaord level per manual.
This is the safest way to have redundancy, it just means you need double the disks (so 16tb worth of drives to have 8 tb of storage).
You wont need any software besides what is included in the motherboad for this.

Now if in the future you expand to 6 or 8 drives then you will need a raid card.
 
yeah i know, its too cheap it probably will suck. if i had the money for a good one id buy it right now. this has turned into more stress than fun lol you all rock though, any and all information is appreciated.
 
I have the LSI MegaRAID 8888ELP. It may only be SATA 2 but for regular hard drives it doesn't matter. I have two RAID 0's (With backups of course) and they get 250-300MB Read/write.

And yes I have converted EVERYTHING (And still in the process with my anime only because of all the MKV's i have, i have to go to each one and select the proper subtitle to hardcode. I use Wondershare Video Converter. Very good tool)

I use to be all about AVI but now that MP4 is the dominate file type and is native to almost everything (Android, PC, Consoles, Apple, Web browsers) No need for it. My server running Plex is a shitty 2 core Celeron 1.8 GHZ with 8GB of ram. I have server 2016 running on it, it is my domain server, Plex server, file server, and i use CrashPlan backup which i have setup on alot of my familes PC to backup to mine and then mine backs up to cloud. I have 13TB Total with more room to grow. I'm still hesitant on getting main drivers bigger than 2TB just due to higher failure rate on the bigger drives. I have 4TB as backups for my two RAID 0's but that is it.

RAID 10 will give you best speed over all for sure. It cost twice as much since you lose half the space though.

Also since they are bluray rips what is the bitrate on them? If they are super high like 10,000Kbps and you watch that on your phone or a tablet device yea that is going to lag. They may not be able to handle that. I just do normal 1080 and have no issue on any device and I got 25/25 FIOS and have a few friends on my Plex Pass account and I never have any issues with streaming to multiple people at once.
 


wow that raid card is a beast ! until i master and fully understand how this stuff works there is no way i see myself forking out even half of that price tag. Im sure once im on your level and understand the value of it and see its true worth then i will get one.

Im interested in this file conversion your talking about, if it will not degrade my video quality at all and makes trans coding almost obsolete, then that seems like a no brainer. First i gotta figure out all this before i can start organizing and tweaking my setup up and files, i need to get the darn thing put together and configured !!

Man that seems like a bummer lol if i do raid 10 , i only have 8 TB of space out of 16 TB lol meaning my 6 TB im trying to protect will take up most of it and leave me with 2 tb to fill with more video right ? UNLESS i just keep the 6 TB on my external as just an extra copy. what i want is 1 drive to fail no problem, no data loss. Have my system automatically backup any NEW media added to the drives. is raid 6 good ? will i get more TB usage out of the drives i just bought ?
 


average bitrate on some of my really high end bluray rips 10-19k
 
great, i restarted my router and pc, because for some random unexplained reason remote access would not connect. after restart remote access works now, but plexpy is not working !! not sure if i need to do port forwarding ? man today has been a tough tech day for me LOL i feel dumb.

At this point im ready pay someone to just fully set me up and fine tune everything related to plex/raid/nas/plexpy/port forwarding, just to make sure stuff is the way it needs to be. The good news is the x4 WD RED NAS 4 TB drives arrived, and are sitting in that box yelling at me, get on with it and lets do this !

I apologize for ranting, thank you again for everyone's help.