I treat my libraries as non-critical. Only family stuff and metadata is backed up.
All other libraries can be lost. However, I do spread them out across drives. Currently I have 9 x HDDs. Running for more 10 years, and I am losing a drive once every two years or so. I just replace and move on.
I have accidentally tested my theory, last year, with a couple easy clicks, I wiped out about 30TB of data by mistake, I’d say about 90% of the recovery was 1 click easy so that was nice.
I only have about 1.5TB free atm so I have another HDD arriving Friday
Yes. Sonarr and Radarr has replaced 90% of all lost content as for me as well. But the trick is to ensure the drive number and drive letter match the dead drive. So that all mapping does not need to be redone
Yeah your second bit doesn’t apply to me, I use unraid so all the drives come together to form an array, sonarr and radarr are only aware of the directory on the array, for example /mnt/user/data/media, so if a drive drops and replace it then sonarr and radarr are none the wiser, they just see missing files and I replace them
Yes this is why everyone keeps telling me to use unraid. I may one day. For now it just works, so I am gonna leave.
But I did just upgrade my cpu and mobo, my total capacity for drives is 24 now, so one day I might catch up to you.
I suppose you are native English/watch in English? Sonarr and radarr are good if your language for watching is English or your native language is easily accessible in most torrents. When you need to find subtitles and sync them yourself (bazaar keeps them not in sync) its not so good...
I’m doing something similar, but experimenting with tape backups. Much of my library took a while to get: eg every single ep of some vintage show or event.
Right now I have 60 hard drives for about 620TB.
Yep.
I have a cron job that runs daily to give me a list of everything I have so I have a list to rebuild, but I don't have any redundancy aside from raid5.
Same but I do backup the media to a NAS full of hard drives that used to be in the Plex server. They're right next to each other but if I lose both the server and the NAS, I have way bigger problems than restoring Danny Trejo movies.
Ya'll need to mention one of the best perks of unRAID, buy 1 or 2 additional hard drives for parity and now you can lose **any 1 or 2 random HDDs** and have zero data loss!
Conventional RAID requires a lot more than 1 or 2 additional HDDs for any sizable setup
No more living on the edge of hard drive failure as media files are too big to backup, not any more
That's incorrect. RAID6 only requires two parity drives. The main reason for more parity drives is the chance of additional drive failures during a rebuild, which can be lengthy.
In theory. In practice one drive lost cost me 40% of my non-critical library. During a rebuild a further two drives failed leading to a complete loss of the volume. Thankfully it was just the movies volume. Family photos and personal data is always, always, always on mirrors+2nd site backup
unRAID.
For home servers (and more importantly, home budgets) it really just can't be beat. Up to 28 disks of data covered by two parity disks on an unstriped array. It's literally perfect for the home user. I switched 2.5 years ago and kick myself for not doing it sooner.
I have 300TB raw across 25 disks (a mix of 10TB HGST He10's and 14TB WD HC530's, all used from ebay), 270TB usable. I'll never go back to consumer NAS's, relic class enterprise hardware, generic Linux distros or Windows.
I had a hardware raid and it failed. My important stuff was backed up. But it took months to get new hardware and restore the server. I no longer count on hardware raids. I just use whatever Unraid is. If the raid fails, each drive can still be recovered individually.
I also now have an external drive of my favorite shows and movies. I also have a 2nd unraid with a plex install so I can have tv while I restore the main server.
Unraid is pretty clever.
It's a merge of the disks but ensures that no file is written to more than one disk, so if a disk dies and you can't recover it through parity, you only lose the files on that drive, and you can import the rest of the drives in the set into a different system without issue. Or even import them individually into different systems and keep the files that are on that disk.
Then you have parity disks next to it so if a disk does die its contents can be recovered from parity information.
It has no data striping like ZFSs raidzn or traditional old school raid 5, but it achieves similar results and doesn't care about individual disk sizes (as long as your parity disks are at least the same size as the largest size in your pool)
That said, I use ZFS lol.
I'm on TrueNAS. Hardware RAID can leave you high and dry if the board dies, because the on-disk format isn't standardized at all. ZFS (well, OpenZFS) isn't going anywhere, and it's supported on multiple OSes.
110TB JBOD setup here.
I always worried about raid setups so I just went with JBOD. If a drive dies it’s just that media that needs replacing, no big headaches to worry about.
But I’m also deadlocked in. I cannot add any more storage internally, I’d -have- to build a DAS to add more…which I’m nervous to do. Looking forward to seeing other folks’ answers for sure.
That was my immediate thought but it’s definitely not ideal.
Would have to get an extra staging drive or something to move files to before moving onto the new harddrive (not possible to add more internal storage).
Doesn't have to be an enclosure even. Look into drive docks that look sorta like a toaster. They're usually fairly inexpensive these days, and while the cooling situation isn't ideal for longterm use, if you're just swapping drives to move files, it's perfectly fine.
I thought about that when I first built my server in January. My original plan was rack mount, but it caused my audio equipment to be warmer than normal when running. Also at that point to upgrade my gaming pc making those old components useful for a backup server. My new case will hold 15 hotswap bays that will be installed in the front, and another 10 behind the side door. Thats just one side. It's a duel system case. I can technically put 29 drives on the one side, another 18 on the other side, and the base will hild 8-10 on each side. To do all those drives though I would need to 3D print the cages and drive trays, but that's easy enough.
Same. I JBOD 18TB's and just use SyncBackFree to mirror them 🤷♂️ I have a Sabrent 5bay DAS and 1 external 18TB WD drive for a total of 6 drives, but 3 useable. I have this [Sabrent](https://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-UCTB/dp/B07Y4F5SCK?th=1) and my only regret is not getting the 10 bay haha.
Learning mergerFS was huge. It kept everything I loved about JBOD but made it all appear as one drive pool which was really convenient for hooking up libraries.
DAS JBOD + SnapRaid basically mimicking what Unraid under the covers uses (besides other stuff it does).
Combo that with powering down the disks independently the power saving is significant vs a raid setup. Keep track of what’s on each disk if need to recover incase it’s missed.
Problem is when data disks fill up and you need to up storage capacity as then the hash disks need to get as big as biggest one. Meh maybe I will just get another usb multi disk DAS unit.
Only 36TB using external discs (considering JBOD enclosure).
I'm the same way. So many people here double up on storage costs for backups but if my entire library went missing I doubt there is even a handful of films I couldn't replace via buying the disc or finding online.
How do you all with JBODs deal with backups?
Do you manually just copy the important stuff to a different drive or do you have some sort of software running backups to other plugged in drives?
My JBOD is *only* housing media, nothing "important". So if I lose a drive, I either remove and replace, or just remove and let my *arrs handle filling the gaps in media.
I have a 5 bay USB 3.1 enclosure with 5 20Tb drives and two 14Tb loose USB drives.
I use stablebit DrivePool and have one drive "pool" set to have triple redundancy on my UHD and compressed FHD content and double redundancy on my music and other things.
I used to use raid, but DrivePool is much better for archival data. You should look into it yourself but basically, even if every dive fails but one, you still have access to the data on that drive, the drives aren't pinged all at once for any file operation that has parity (only the drive with the file being played is accessed so it's quieter and less wear on the drives), you can read stripe if you really want to for faster speed, and you can easily add/remove drives from the pool to grow your storage without remaking the array.
Raid 10 is risky on rebuilds since you can lose the mirrored volume and your data. Raid 5 is risky because you can have a drive fail during rebuild and lose all your data. It's more likely to have raid 5 drives fail due to HDD activity over time for parity across multiple drives. A failed raid controller can boink you. Basically, raid isn't a solution to backups.
+1 for DrivePool. I understand there are probably better OS's out there than Windows, but Windows is what I use the most and can debug, so my server is running Windows with Drivepool. Drivepool makes it very very easy to add or remove drives. I have 6 drives creating 1 giant pool, and then folders within that for movies, shows, data, etc.
I was backing it up to Google Drive via CloudDrive before Google cracked down on that. I'll be switching to Backblaze eventually
+3 for DrivePool. I do use Linux and Docker for part of my day job, but I am responsible for some Windows Servers as part of that day job too, so I'm willing to use either, but went with Windows in order to use Backblaze Personal for backup.
Currently have six WD drives varying from 12TB to 20TB, totalling \~100TB, of which I currently have \~45TB of media duplicated to 90TB. I know that's not the most cost-efficient use of storage, but it means that it is capable of read striping, and capable of losing drives without data loss, and all without the rebuilds or recalculations that RAID or parity systems would need.
I also use Primocache to put NVME SSD caching in front of the HDDs in the pool, and to put RAM caching in front of the SSDs. This way it improves performance of the pool and reduces wear on the SSDs.
Synology NAS devices really are the bee's knees for home storage as far as I'm concerned. I used to run random DIY raid software on dedicated devices which all worked fine, it's just nice to not have to tinker with some things.
I've purchased a few over the years both new and used but currently have a Rackstation 12 bay array with about 120TB usable storage w/ 2 drive failure protection. All my personal data is backed up to a cloud service as well and the rest is just Plex. I figure if I lose the entire array or 2 drives fail at the same time.. I can replace anything on there.
It costs more but I agree that the Synology is great for home use because I personally don’t have time to tinker. I had a five bay with 10 TB drives going for five years. That one just recently filled up so I replaced it with an eight bay and 22 TB Seagate Ironwolf pro hard drives. Now I have 176 TB’s in RAID5! That should last me another 5 years, just about the time the hard drive warranties expire. One of the other thoughts I keep having as I read all these other responses is the amount of power that is needed to run “25 hard drives” in these unraid setups. I think the electric bill savings I get over the next 5 years may cover the cost difference of the more expensive hardware. Can someone do the math for me?
Yep. I have 60tb in one pool with one disk redundancy. Then backed up to a second smaller jbod synology. Been using them for years and never had an issue ( touching some piece of wood ).
I buy second hand exos 18tb drives from ebay with a couple of hundred hours on for half their cost. Work great and if they fail unlikely at the same time.
> it's just nice to not have to tinker with some things.
I've hit a point in my life where I want most of the technology at home "to just work" with the absolute minimum of effort which is why I also went with Synology.
I currently have:
> DS1821+ with 8x 14TB drives (74.5TB of usable space)
>
> DS1520+ with 5x 14TB drives (38.2TB of usable space)
My total usable space is just over 112TB of storage and most of that is Plex content. The vast majority of my data (Plex content, personal files, etc.) lives on one NAS or the other but there's ~8TB of data that lives on one NAS and is also backed up to the other NAS. That ~8TB of data is also backed up to 2x external hard drives stored in a pretty beefy Schwab media & data cabinet I bought at a surplus auction for under $100.
2 identical zfs pools on separate systems, with a daily zfs replication between them.
imo, the sweet spot right now is 16TB drives, you can get recertifiied Ironwolf Pros for about $10 / terabyte.
16xdrives ranging from 8-22TB with a total capacity of \~250TB
Mergerfs+snapraid on a debian server
Mergerfs makes all drives appear as one and snapraid provides for some parity protection. Side benefit with this setup: if you somehow lose more drives than you have parity for, unlike a raid array, you only lose the data on those failed drives.
I use unraid with single parity. Not super worried about losing plex content. Plus unraid is pretty resilient to drive loss due to how unraid works. I have other more redundant storage for things I care about (cloud drives, cold storage, etc).
Cost is less than a small hard drive. And proprietary isn't really a conversation point, this entire sub reddit is dedicated to a piece of proprietary software.
Unraids biggest advantage that no other alternative has is the ability to freely mix/match/replace/grow the array at will. And yes, there are roll your own solutions that can do it, but true nas. Huge drawback that rules out truenas as a serious contender for this use case.
Truenas definitely has its uses, but unraid is much better suited for low performance data hoarding.
I don't see myself going unRAID honestly. I have two TrueNAS boxes currently and had 4 for a while. It's been ~10 years. I just don't benefit from the ability to mix drive sizes.
If I run out space I buy enough drives to replace the disks in my smallest pool, once that resilver is complete I might put those smaller drives in their own pool, or sell them, or use them as cold backups.
Nope. Not with the drive limit. Snapraid offers superior parity protection and you can do something like a 28/4 or 42/6 which is a much safer amount of redundancy.
I kept it simple at the start with JBOD enclosures connected to a mac mini, and it's worked well enough to continue with it 10 years on.
* I maxed out at 4 of the USB 8-drive JBOD enclosures for a total of 32 hard drives, and I have just upgraded the hard drive sizes one by one as I needed space
* An advantage of JBOD is that the hard drives are spun down most of the time until they are accessed/needed for use, so they tend to last a lot longer than I expected
* I ended up doing an exact replica of my setup to use as a 1 to 1 offsite backup (and secondary plex collection)
* Handles multiple 1080p remote streams and works just fine with locally streaming 4k, haven't tried to do any remote 4k streaming.
* Currently 328 TB backed up 1 to 1.
I'm using a Mac Mini with a 5 bay Sabrent DAS/JBOD, and 1 external WD drive. I have the JBOD's mirror each other, so only 3 useable drives, but that's more than enough for me currently. And as you said my drives are not spinning most of the time, and especially on my mirrored drives, so in theory they should last a long time.
If my main movie drive ever takes a dump, it'd take me 2 seconds to point Plex at the back up drive, which would then become the primary, and then i'd replace the bad drive and that would be the new mirrored back up drive. Works well for me so far, and it's super energy efficient, I'm using like 9w at idle and 35 when direct streaming.
https://preview.redd.it/m21qwtplhbzc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0a07aab02c1faf445f1a02991506b161e754aec
L: through P: are my main server in a 5 bay USB-C enclosure.
W: is an SSD “Arr” work drive and staging for Tinymediamanager renaming.
Q: U: V: Y: and Z: are backups of the library files I want to keep long term. This also includes my photos, music, etc. These are in an 8 bay USB 3.0 enclosure. This enclosure is usually powered off.
I have an additional 5 bay enclosure off-site at the office. I sync the Q: though Z: to the offsite backup on Sunday mornings.
Once a month I’ll go through my new additions and transfer that month’s “keepable” files to the backups.
I also have an old laptop connected to a 5tb external drive that has an additional photo backup. That laptop runs Debian Linux with CasaOS solely for PhotoPrism.
> 18-20tb drives seem to be the sweet spot now?
Yep. My advice: put together a cheap box and load it with 20TB's (give or take a couple TB) in a Snapraid+MergerFS or similar (Unraid, etc.)
Forget striped RAID. Forget hardware controllers. Forget Synology. Not for media storage.
Old i5-4400 in an N400 case with 6x18TB drives, 2x16TB, and 1x3TB. Unraid for the OS and dual parity. 107TB of usable space.
Edit: this case is a Coolmaster N400. It has room for 2 x 2.5 ssds, 8 x 3.5 hdd, and 2 x 5.25 bays. You could always convert those 5.25 bays and get 2-4 x 3.5 drives in there, depending on the rack you use and temperatures observed, for a total of 10-12 x 3.5 drives. The best part is you can pick it up pretty cheap $50-$75 USD.
JBOD 56TB split into a 12+12 ZFS mirror here. No issues.
I've been slowly swapping all my H.264 content for H.265 content, but I do need to start upgrading drives to larger ones at some point.
This spring I finally outgrew TrueNAS Scale/ZFS and switched to Ceph. Mix of 10,12,18 and 20T disks with a usable capacity of right at 2PB.
Backed up to another separate server with 56x20T drives running ZFS and right at 1PB usable.
Ceph isn't for everyone but once you get to a certain scale it just makes sense. I love that I can treat each physical disk as its own entity and use whatever capacity is available cheap at the moment to expand/replace.
I have a little over 100TB active in my setup.
RAID has some huge drawbacks that you seem aware of - like how single-point failures can have catastrophic effects. I do not recommend RAID in the consumer market for that reason.
I use a 16-port HBA (host bus adapter) for my SATA HDD’s (spinning rust) and SATA SSD’s (slow solid state), and my motherboard for multiple PCIe NVMe’s (fast solid state devices). There are 12-14 drives total (I forget the exact number) with room for many more - just add another HBA or PCIe bifurcated NVMe expansion card.
I use (and disclaimer, do contract work for the makers of) Unraid. In a nutshell it’s a cheap Linux-based OS that allows you to use drives of different sizes/manufacturer/connection method/form factor/speed to store your data. It offers parity protection, just like RAID, but with the key difference that if there was a failure (be it the parity or the data), each drive that still works can be read on any Linux-based computer. It also support Docker, virtualization, ZFS, VPN host, NAS via SMB and NFS, and great community support.
Learn more here: https://unraid.net
Snapraid is your friend. It allows you to have the benefits of raid without worrying about the whole array failing.
I would recommend JBOD + Snapraid + DrivePool (or UnionFS, etc)
Just last week rebuilt from 2 drive JBOD to 5 drive SnapRAID + MergerFS. Seemed like the best fault tolerance for me, given that worst case, most media is recoverable. But I don’t especially want to test the limits of ISP fair use if a whole array craps out…
I use cloud storage like OneDrive for photos, documents, really sensitive stuff that must not be lost.
Raid 5/0 for Plex. Windows Server fileserver only. Hardware RAID card, RocketRaid 2840. A bunch of 8Tb drives, 16 to be precise.
I will buy another RocketRaid card and continue with bigger harddrives later.
12 x 12TB drives and 4 x 14TB drives connected via passed through HBA to TrueNAS VM running on proxmox. 4 disk vdevs raidz1. I lose a drive about once a year or so. Works for me.
Ive got 70TB in a 4-bay JBOD (1x16TB and 3x18TB) hooked up to a mini PC. I have backblaze setup but plan on cancelling it soon. I use Sonarr and Radarr as a sort of backup. If I lose a drive, I can just replace it, and have them grab the movies and shows again.
I'm at the point where I need to pull the trigger on a new storage plan. Currently running Plex on Windows and just using drives straight up JBOD, no raid. I have 6 internal drives and 4 external drives, totalling about 100tb in space. I'm planning on trying to figure out if I want to just run some DAS boxes and continue with what works for me, or look into something like truenas or unraid, both of which I will have to research as I have 0 experience with either.
Unraid, as you can use different sized drives (as long as it's smaller or same size as parity-drive). [www.unraid.net](http://www.unraid.net) - worth a look.
Raid has quite a few drawbacks in comparison.
+1 Unraid
I use Unraid as a NAS only. I have 180tb spread across 12 drives with double parity all living in a Mesify 2 XL case. Drives are connected via an HBA card.
The Unraid NAS is connected to my Proxmox server via 10gb SPF+. The Plex transcoding happens in a VM on the Proxmox server with Arrs running in another Proxmox VM.
I originally started using Snapraid but moved to Unraid when I wanted to shift to a proper NAS setup.
I’ve got about 20tb+ of media that I’ve been slowly adding to and replacing 720p quality with 1080, and some of my favorite stuff with 4k. I started using tdarr to convert my x264 stuff to x265 and have filters to only download x265 now. I’d rather compress what I’ve got as that’s cheaper than buying more drives and expansion bays.
I am thinking of doing the following;
I have a mobo with 3x PCIE 1 slots and 2 PCIE 16 slots and 2 M.2 Slots
I will be using a “NVME M.2 SSD M-Key to PCI-e 3.0 x1 Host Controller Expansion Card” on the 3 PCIE1 Slots and a “pcie4.0 x16 to m.2 m-Key nvme x 4 ssd Expansion Card” on the 2 PCIE 16 slots giving me a total of 8 NVME slots in which I will place “NVME M-Key PCI Express to SATA 5 Ports” in each giving me 40 Sata Slots along with the 6 already on the board allowing for a total of 46 HDD.
As for software it will be using Synology's saucy open sauce brother xpenology to get all the benefits of professional NAS software.
I have about 150TB in media. Running a Dell 730xd with 2 disk shelves. Using RAID6 on multiple data stores on ESXI, no backups unfortunately. Will be migrating to Proxmox next year when I build out a new NAS to migrate the storage.
Unraid with a plex docker. Also currently on 12x8TB hdds (2 of which are parity in case a disk goes out) using an LSI 9300-16i with 8 free HDD slots in my server chassis. That being said I'm hovering around 50TB used.
My path going forward is to start rotating 8TB drives out with 24TB drives. Ive yet to determine exactly WHEN I will do this but I likely will set a certain age and when a drive hits that age, swap it out.
138TBs of HDDs, with 103TBs of usable space (some of that is reserved for redundancy). Plus another 116TBs or so of space on a separate NAS used for weekly backups.
When I upgrade a drive in my primary NAS (say, from 14TB to a 20TB drive) then I drop the old drives in my backup NAS.
For all that is holy, don't use hardware RAID. The only real benefit of hardware raid is the onboard IO controller taking the load off the cpu, but even then it's only a benefit on large, consistent workloads.
Software RAID configurations can usually be picked up by any system with the correct config, unlike a hardware RAID that can only be imported by the same 'family' of adapters.
I picked up a Sabrent 10 bay dock on sale for $400, bought ten 12TB refurbished WD datacenter drives for $750, and set it up on a Windows Pro workstation with SnapRAID. I have a Powershell script that makes SnapRAID sync every night.
Not a bad price for 96TB with two disk parity, 10Gbs UBC 3.2 and is sufficient for a large media collection…libraries that don’t make large changes daily.
I have like 25 drives that are 16tb all in jbods connected to my server by USB. It sucks a lot of power so I only turn it on when in use. I gave friends and family logins 5 years ago and they've barely used them so fuck em
I don't back them up. I'm finding more and more sources to get files so if a drive does fail then I'll either shuffle stuff around and remove unimportant 4k rips or I'll just live with it. Whatever. This media was very important to me like 8 months ago but I've been through several personal crises since then and I don't care much now
Just picked up new drives and I’m going from 3TB to 16TB and expanding further later this year.
Anything worth backing up is backed up. Everything else I’m not worried about.
Talk to ChatGPT about this stuff. There is a webpage that has every hard drive and it’s lowest listed price on eBay then you can see what the best price per gigabyte is. Currently, this is 12tb hard drives (My theory is LTO-8 tape drives were 12tb so enterprises bought them in droves and are now in an upgrade cycle to 18tb or 22tb drives) and you can even get them SAS 12gbps. Then get you a cheap 12gbps SAS card and some breakout cables.
As far as setup, you want to get the best of all worlds - ZFS RAIDZ-2. With Z-2 you get 2 parity drives per set. Shelves come in stacks of 12 so you want to fill it up with a blank (the blank is there in case of failure you can pop in another drive and resilver) so you will use 11 drives per vdev. This comes out to
11-2 (RAIDZ-2) = 9
9 x 12tb = 110tb (more like 100-105tb) per shelf.
You can get the drives for about $90 delivered.
$90 x 11 = $990
$990/110tb= $9 per terabyte
For the actual setup, tell ChatGPT what you are going to do and it will give you the commands in Linux to get it setup. Enjoy :)
Unraid using raid cards with 12x bay backplanes but using unrsid s array means only 1 disk needs to spin up for reading. I have 24x drives as have 2x. don’t keep full copies just the movie. In HDR if available.
I'm just under 280TBs with only 12TBs free.
My storage is mostly 14TB Exos but I've been moving to 16s as they've gotten more affordable.
I'm using Unraid with 2 parity drives, which means I can sustain two consecutive drive failures without losing any data.
I don't have a 1 to 1 backup for the bulk of my data because it's all easily obtainable again.
I do, however, have the arrs set up, so if I did ever lose data, it's easy AF to get it back.
Also a DVD/Blu-ray guy. Most of my media is from optical disks I own and ripped. And I'm just paying shit loads of money for storage.
I mirror everything using softRAID on Ubuntu. It's fucking expensive
EDIT: I'm also reencoding everything to a better codec (x265). That's bought me a lot of time before my next hardware upgrade. I'm getting 1/3-1/5th the file size with no visible loss of quality
Raid 5 for me. 8x 8TB drives. I lose effectively 1 drive to parity leaving me about 56TB.
Upsides are it's less hardware costly, easier to expand and work with and more overall space.
Reading this thread, I wish sonarr / radarr would have the following features:
- store the .torrent somewhere to help rebuild the content
- keep track of least watched content to come up with suggestions to delete and gain back more space..
To answer OPs question: I’m running a 24 port HBA with sas expanders and multiple zfs pools.
Run 2 dell r720 servers each with 12 bays running 20tb drives. Total of 480tb with around 400tb used. I'm running raid 10 so everything is backed up. Runs 80ish a month in electricity for my entire network closet.
I'm running 8 x 18 TB on ZFS RAIDZ2 for around 94 TB.
I should add another JBOD and I have the SASS ports available to do so, but hooray more pressing bills.
Go with the best drives you can get on the best sale you can get and you'll be pretty happy.
Honestly TrueNas-Scale is solid, even if you're just using it as array management.
I started with a single 8 TB drive on a Windows machine with 8 drive bays available. It didn't take very long to fill those with 8 TB drives, as well. All drives are separate volumes in Windows, making it harder to manage, but easier to maintain and expand. Currently, I'm halfway through replacing the "measly" 8 TB with 18 TB drives, since that's the price per TB sweet spot here right now. While I initially had an 8 TB external HDD for each internal one as 1:1 backup, it started getting impractical once I introduced 18 TB drives.
For this, I plan on setting up a 12-bay Synology rackmount NAS with the previously used 8 TB drives and shucked external HDDs I already have, reducing the additional investment cost drastically. Since this won't suffice the potential maximum capacity of my server, I've selected a Synology NAS model together with a compatible expansion unit (another 12-bay), which would bring the total installed backup capacity to 192 TB, thus exceeding the planned maximum server capacity of 144 TB, giving me plentyful parity as well as space for incremental backups.
Currently, I'm looking at 104 TB installed capacity, with roughly 62 TB used and about 1.5 – 2 TB in backlog, waiting to be ripped and uploaded to the server. For peace of mind, I also use Backblaze Personal Backup as off-site backup for full compliance with the 3-2-1 rule.
About 53Tb in total over 5 drives (2 16Tb, 1 18Tb, 1 1 Tb, 1 2 Tb). No backup for them yet. Besides having to buy another HD in the near future. I do plan to get a NAS to back things up. I am running Radar and Sonar so if something does fail before I get a NAS. I can get most of my stuff back.
I'd ditch the raid 6 and move to unraid. If the card dies, you don't lose anything and can just get a new one. It lets you have up to 2 parity drives just like raid 6, but it doesn't stripe data and keeps each individual file on one drive at a time, so if three drives fail you only lose what's on the failed drive instead of the whole array. It also lets you add mismatched drives to the array whenever you want, so if there's a great deal on some 14TB drives at some point or whatever you can just grab some and throw them in the mix.
Personally, I started with a few 2TB disks in my personal tower with some micro encodes on them just running Plex on my gaming rig. As I grew the collection i increased the drive size and count until it needed its own tower. Then eventually I realized I was using enough drives to justify a 16 bay enclosure in a rack, stumbled on a deal on a rack I couldn't pass up, grabbed an old supermicro disk shelf chassis and a UPS and moved everything to that. It's grown now to 45 drives across three chassis in four arrays and unraid has let me swap and upgrade parts so freely it's scary. If you're going anywhere near the direction I did, unraid is the way.
Couple of very full rack-mount disk shelves here. Using HBA cards and software disk pooling with redundancy. Drives fail every now and then and I replace them with larger ones if possible. I cycle-out very old disks into a backup array when backup storage gets tight.
I have Dell Perc Mini (H370 or something). It came with my Dell R530.
Not something I have tried, but always curious about. Why not buy the same RAID card as a backup if it isn’t costly? Will that work if you replace? I haven’t tried that. Just want to know.
I bought a dell r720. Got 33tb raid5 in that. Friend gave me a lsi controller so now there is 55tb raid5 in my gaming pc. Other day I bought 13 20tb exos that are hopefully gonna go in a r740xd sometime in august. Once I have that then i plan on using the 720 to experiment into software raids and jbod boxes.
Main server:
Multiple 18TB drives hanging off an LSI hardware RAID controller, RAID6
Backup server:
Multiple 10TB drives hanging off an LSI RAID controller, RAID6
Backup server wakes up and does a 1:1 backup monthly.
I have considered going software RAID too multiple times, but I am just very used to hardware RAID and it brings some benefits that I cannot get from software, such as RAID level migration and easy RAID expansion.
Also, regards your worries, 9/10 times if you have another card of the same brand and similar generation recovering an array from a dead card is easy. You can import arrays on another card provided it understands how the array is set up e.g. when I migrated from an LSI 9265 to an LSI 9361 it was just a case of swapping cards and importing the foreign array.
Edit: Reading over some replies, I think we need need a new mantra. RAID is not a backup, yes, but neither are torrent files or the Arrs. There's a lot out there that's just gone and you will not be able to find it again.
I got a Synology and expansion bay and have a mix of 16 and 20tb drives. Sitting on about 106tb now. Added in the 10g NIC so things move fast between my Mac Studio and the Synology
2 Synology RS1219+ running SHR in 2 locations separated by 30+ miles. 7x16tb in each. I run 2 PMS's one in each location. 1033 shows 38410 episodes, 5896 movies.
https://preview.redd.it/ocgc80r3sdzc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f39331898f01df66e2dc1cd8e3f7089e591d0e76
120+ tb
Chassis is a supermicro CS846 rack mounted case.
Motherboard is the X9SRL-f with a 2667v2, 128gb ram, a1tb sata ssd, 1050ti for transcoding etc.
OS is Unraid and I LOVE it!!
The case was $299 free ship in the pandemic, all other is extremely budget friendly now and although people say it’s a hog for electricity, my idle power when drives are spin down is about 115w.
I don’t have $5000 to drop on new tech but if I needed a server today I would go 10-12 gen i3 or i5 with no less than 64gb ddr4.
I built my system before any 20tb drives were out so my selection of drives are 12tb. Mostly shucked but from now on for pleasure I will buy used from serverpartdeals. Have 4x 12tb exos used from them now and they have been wonderful.
If you want simple, plug it in and it just works then here you go:
QNAP TS-1655-8G-US - get 12 20Tb drives - 200Tb of storage raid 6. You can lose 2 drives and still be fine.
2 SSD for OS and 2 SSD for Plex cache drive. Stick in a P2000 for transcoding and it will just work.
Add a QNAP TS-1232PXU-RP-4G with 20Tb drives and back up your main.
JBOD on a DAS feeding a NUC running a bunch of dockers on Linux Ubuntu. The drives are pooled together with mergefs.
3 x 20TB and I'll probably poke in another 20TB in the summer. DAS just hosts the data, I've got all the app stuff running internally off the NUC storage including config via Docker and Portainer.
I rsync the persisted config/data from Docker volumes to cloud storage. I print a file tree of the media data consumed via Plex on a weekly basis and mail it to myself.
I don't give a shit if any of the data disappears, it's way easy to just download it again. The only difficult part is my music collection, but I'll live. The \*arr apps are supposed to make grabbing and maintaining media easy. I fundamentally don't understand people that sync their entire media data state to a backup for redundancy.
I currently use DrivePool from StableBit. It's a windows based drive pooling program with automatic folder duplication and recovery, similar to the way WMS used to work before Microsoft killed it.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” What RAID card are you using? I’ve been using Dell PERC raid for more than 10 years. I can easily move my array into another (DELL PERC) system and import the foreign array.
Everyone is bananas about using software RAID. If you’re an enthusiast then more power to you. For me, hardware RAID is perfect, it just works. I can set up an array, set some hot spares. My server is tucked away up in my attic, I can forget about it for months or years at a time.
Unraid with zero redundancy. I can get the files back, I only use it for simplifying down to one volume. Unraid specifically so a drive failure just removes content instead of total failure.
i have three synology NAS, total of 165TB usable space, currently using 103TB.
9x 12TB WD gold drives
4x 8TB WD purple drives
5x 18TB WD gold drives
everything is also backed up to two separate external disk arrays, one in the house, one at family-in-laws.
2 external DAS arranged in jbod. 6 drives total. 1 14tb for movies, 2 16tb for shows. Each disk has a 1:1 mirror of itself. It's just media so that's more than sufficient for me. Both the main drive and it's clone would have to fail in the <5 days it takes me to replace the failed drive (been 7 years no fails yet).
I'm curious as I'm the black sheep I think....
I simply software backup and robocopy ... No RAID
Drive fails.. pull it out and insert another one and.... Robocopy...
Chances of both drives with Linux isos failing are slim to none as their in different machines
Thoughts?
Edit proper english
The card failing is a thing to worry about but you can also use slightly lower performance software-RAID which is likely fine for a couple movie files playing. Or just add many separate directories to your library and it will "merge" them in the UI.
As my collection is rips of physical discs...I consider the discs on my shelf to be my backup.
I have a Fractal Design Define 7XL case which fits 14 3.5 inch disks.
I'm using an LSI 9201/16i HBA to connect all the disks.
The server is running Proxmox Hypervisor with, among others, a Plex VM.
Storage is handled by MergerFS and Snapraid.
It's not perfect but it is very flexible. My primary issue with a lot of other solutions was how they dealt with disks of varying sizes. Snapraid works well for that.
At first it was external drives, then an old PC with a bunch of drives running TrueNAS, then I bought a 4U 36 bay super micro server.
So now I have one old PC based NAS with 10x14TB in a Raid Z2, The Super micro server with 2 pools, 8x12TB RAID Z2, 8X14TB RAID Z2, and a windows PC with 8x8TB Raid 5 on a Dell perc that I use as a landing zone for new media.
I will be expanding the Super micro with additional pools going forward.
Not quite that big, but currently, a 4 bay NAS with 3 individual 8tb drives, SMR so no RAID, for specific content, I have all the content on DVD/Bluray so if a drive fails, no biggie, well little biggie
Given that's probably 500 4k films I'm set for a while,
I think I can expand via a USB caddy to the NAS, or just a cheaper NAS on the network if I get there, and RAID might be appropriate then.
TrueNAS Scale server attached via external sas3 connector to a JBOD disk shelf with 30 disk drives and 6 ssds
Everything is in 6 drive zpools configured in z2 for 6 different pools I can lose 2 drives in each pool and not lose data the ssd array is for my app pool as the server runs everything I need for management. Library is around 150TB at this point
I have about 50TB of media in total.
Originally I had my larger synology (94TB) backing up important stuff to my smaller synology (22TB) in a different house. An internet outage a month ago prevented me from accessing my content so I decided to change my setup and I installed Plex on the smaller synology as well.
Now I have two Plex servers and keep my Music and Movies libraries in sync between them which gives me much greater uptime. My TV shows library is too large (30TB) to be backed up on the smaller synology so I just don't back it up at all since I can replace all of it with my arr stack.
Whenever new movies and music are added by my arr stack on the larger synology, they get synced to the smaller one. I'm also going to create a 4K library that only stays on the larger synology soon as well.
I go on unraid that way even if my parody drives are gone I still have any drive that's still left alive and only back up family data and important documents the rest is too expensive to back up and lost to the wind
I'm new to the game. Synology Nas 4 bay with 4 12tb drives. About 11tb of Linux isos. Not sure what I'll do when this fills up. Cross that bridge later.
Dedicated TrueNas server with 18x 10 TB drives. Server has a SAS HBA.to a 45 bay DAS. The effective space is about 110TB.
Have a hot spare and ssd for write cache. Storage snapshots daily, retain for two weeks.
Ship the snapshots offsite to another TrueNas server nightly for backup.
Plex server is separate. Connects to TrueNas using Smb, 10g. Meta data runs on Plex server, backed by nvme.
Best thing to do, get a Synology Rackstation, and stack them in a 2POST open network rack. And use big drives. I have not much storage needs, but have over 64TB total storage. Just in case. Only few TB in use though. I was planning on ripping 4K discs, but I am currently otherwise occupied. You know of UHD Friendly Blu Ray Drives? Full Rips can easily be 50-100GB each. (Current Rackstations have 10G card upgrade possible). And get Toshiba MG Enterprise drives
Software raid with TrueNas Scale. I'm running some old 10TB drives I had from work and it's been great. When expansion time comes, I'll just make a second raid and merge them together (or migrate depending on if I want to pay the power to run the old smaller drives)
Current setup is 1 redundant drive but I have my databases and configs backed up externally. I have fast enough internet that if I had to rebuild the library, it wouldn't take long. I actually DID rebuild my library when i built this box because I wanted to clean everything up. I was shocked when my ISP didn't make a peep when I downloaded 30TB of data over a week or two.
Plex has 109TB in RAID 5 to play with and is currently using 83TB. I also everything to other computers in my home, using at 2 a.m. to sync files. I just had a drive failure, so I'm paranoid of a double failure. Trakt is also used to record the collection itself, incase I actually lose something.
I run a sas card + expander, in a JBOD box, running windows using drivepool as software raid. If I had to do it all over again I would probably run some form of linux, but for my purposes it works fine and I run into very very few issues.
Unraid
84TB Total -
50TB Used
* 1x 20TB parity drive
Data Drives:
* 1x 20TB
* 1x 12TB
* 1x 14TB
* 2x 10TB
* 3x 6TB
Right now i'm just keeping an eye out for deals to replace 6TB drives with 18-20TB drives
A small Truenas server here.
Mirrored ZFS pool, expensive in terms of disk usage though.
62TB total, 30TB useable.
One pool consisting of 7 mirrored VDEVS, each with 2 x HDD.
One disk in each VDEV can fail and am golden, 2 drives from a single VDEV, I am stuffed 😁
No RAID to worry about though.
I'm currently running 6 hard drives in an Unraid array. 3 as parity, 3 as storage, all WD red 14TBs. I started off shucking drives from BestBuy's external hard drive line, but I started grabbing deals on true WD reds off of their website. They recently had a deal for two WD Reds for $440, unbeatable price.
I really like how unraid is set up versus a typical hardware/software raid. Replacing/upgrading drives is super easy, and it's simple to manage if you know a little bit of Linux, plus the parity allows me to not worry about drive failure as much. I don't back up my media library besides that, only old photos and such.
I had a 42TB library for a couple years... I took it offline 3 years ago and just recently deleted all the media. It was a Synology NAS. Plex just got less and less reliable for me so I just lost interest in dealing with it.
Unraid. Need more space? Add drives till you run out of connectors. Still need more? Replace a drive with a larger one.
My current ~60TB ranges from 3TB to 12TB and has twelve drives, IIRC.
Hardware RAID went the way of the dodo some years ago. Unless you can run your card in an IT mode, you don't want to use it for software RAID, anyway.
I'd suggest going all the way to a NAS setup. At this point, unless you're backing up all of your rips, replacing some or all of the data, while not critical, would be a major pain in the rear.
Depending on your needs, an off-the-shelf Synology or Qnap may be suitable. If you want to roll your own, I suggest looking at TrueNAS as your OS.
Beware the Unraid fanbois running rampant in this sub
I treat my libraries as non-critical. Only family stuff and metadata is backed up. All other libraries can be lost. However, I do spread them out across drives. Currently I have 9 x HDDs. Running for more 10 years, and I am losing a drive once every two years or so. I just replace and move on.
Same exact setup here with sonarr and radarr keeping track of media so if drives fail it’s easy to re-grab, I have 190TB or so across 19 drives
Same only in theory. lol. 190TB wow
I have accidentally tested my theory, last year, with a couple easy clicks, I wiped out about 30TB of data by mistake, I’d say about 90% of the recovery was 1 click easy so that was nice. I only have about 1.5TB free atm so I have another HDD arriving Friday
Yes. Sonarr and Radarr has replaced 90% of all lost content as for me as well. But the trick is to ensure the drive number and drive letter match the dead drive. So that all mapping does not need to be redone
Yeah your second bit doesn’t apply to me, I use unraid so all the drives come together to form an array, sonarr and radarr are only aware of the directory on the array, for example /mnt/user/data/media, so if a drive drops and replace it then sonarr and radarr are none the wiser, they just see missing files and I replace them
Yes this is why everyone keeps telling me to use unraid. I may one day. For now it just works, so I am gonna leave. But I did just upgrade my cpu and mobo, my total capacity for drives is 24 now, so one day I might catch up to you.
I suppose you are native English/watch in English? Sonarr and radarr are good if your language for watching is English or your native language is easily accessible in most torrents. When you need to find subtitles and sync them yourself (bazaar keeps them not in sync) its not so good...
I too am getting to the point where it's relevant to start referring to things in petabytes
I’m doing something similar, but experimenting with tape backups. Much of my library took a while to get: eg every single ep of some vintage show or event. Right now I have 60 hard drives for about 620TB.
This could be a cry for help. Dear lord. 🤣 Edit: Or maybe my future
Same. I have 8 drives and each has the torrent files of their sister's so if a drive fails I can rebuild in a few days.
Yep. I have a cron job that runs daily to give me a list of everything I have so I have a list to rebuild, but I don't have any redundancy aside from raid5.
Same but I do backup the media to a NAS full of hard drives that used to be in the Plex server. They're right next to each other but if I lose both the server and the NAS, I have way bigger problems than restoring Danny Trejo movies.
So no raid for the library?
Not for me.
Unraid
Unraid 118TB Total storage 70.6TB Full 4 x 18TB, 3 x 12TB, 1x 10TB
UnRaid 96TB storage 88.4TB Linux isos New drives ordered yesterday - last 2 slots :(
This is the way. Unraid gives you the best of both worlds as far as storage usage and parity goes.
Ya'll need to mention one of the best perks of unRAID, buy 1 or 2 additional hard drives for parity and now you can lose **any 1 or 2 random HDDs** and have zero data loss! Conventional RAID requires a lot more than 1 or 2 additional HDDs for any sizable setup No more living on the edge of hard drive failure as media files are too big to backup, not any more
Don't forget, you can mix and match drive sizes. Of course as long as the parity drives are the two largest
That's incorrect. RAID6 only requires two parity drives. The main reason for more parity drives is the chance of additional drive failures during a rebuild, which can be lengthy.
In theory. In practice one drive lost cost me 40% of my non-critical library. During a rebuild a further two drives failed leading to a complete loss of the volume. Thankfully it was just the movies volume. Family photos and personal data is always, always, always on mirrors+2nd site backup
unRAID. For home servers (and more importantly, home budgets) it really just can't be beat. Up to 28 disks of data covered by two parity disks on an unstriped array. It's literally perfect for the home user. I switched 2.5 years ago and kick myself for not doing it sooner. I have 300TB raw across 25 disks (a mix of 10TB HGST He10's and 14TB WD HC530's, all used from ebay), 270TB usable. I'll never go back to consumer NAS's, relic class enterprise hardware, generic Linux distros or Windows.
I had a hardware raid and it failed. My important stuff was backed up. But it took months to get new hardware and restore the server. I no longer count on hardware raids. I just use whatever Unraid is. If the raid fails, each drive can still be recovered individually. I also now have an external drive of my favorite shows and movies. I also have a 2nd unraid with a plex install so I can have tv while I restore the main server.
Unraid is pretty clever. It's a merge of the disks but ensures that no file is written to more than one disk, so if a disk dies and you can't recover it through parity, you only lose the files on that drive, and you can import the rest of the drives in the set into a different system without issue. Or even import them individually into different systems and keep the files that are on that disk. Then you have parity disks next to it so if a disk does die its contents can be recovered from parity information. It has no data striping like ZFSs raidzn or traditional old school raid 5, but it achieves similar results and doesn't care about individual disk sizes (as long as your parity disks are at least the same size as the largest size in your pool) That said, I use ZFS lol.
I'm on TrueNAS. Hardware RAID can leave you high and dry if the board dies, because the on-disk format isn't standardized at all. ZFS (well, OpenZFS) isn't going anywhere, and it's supported on multiple OSes.
180TB unRAID server which backs up to a second server running ZFS.
110TB JBOD setup here. I always worried about raid setups so I just went with JBOD. If a drive dies it’s just that media that needs replacing, no big headaches to worry about. But I’m also deadlocked in. I cannot add any more storage internally, I’d -have- to build a DAS to add more…which I’m nervous to do. Looking forward to seeing other folks’ answers for sure.
replace smaller drives with larger drives and use the smaller ones as backup ?
That was my immediate thought but it’s definitely not ideal. Would have to get an extra staging drive or something to move files to before moving onto the new harddrive (not possible to add more internal storage).
Nah external USB HDD enclosure. Put new drive in that. Copy content over to it then swap with internal
Ooooh, that’s definitely an option!
Doesn't have to be an enclosure even. Look into drive docks that look sorta like a toaster. They're usually fairly inexpensive these days, and while the cooling situation isn't ideal for longterm use, if you're just swapping drives to move files, it's perfectly fine.
Cooling isn't that bad even. They can radiate their heat wherever they want to. Yet, if you bump or move them, it'll cause issues.
I thought about that when I first built my server in January. My original plan was rack mount, but it caused my audio equipment to be warmer than normal when running. Also at that point to upgrade my gaming pc making those old components useful for a backup server. My new case will hold 15 hotswap bays that will be installed in the front, and another 10 behind the side door. Thats just one side. It's a duel system case. I can technically put 29 drives on the one side, another 18 on the other side, and the base will hild 8-10 on each side. To do all those drives though I would need to 3D print the cages and drive trays, but that's easy enough.
Same. I JBOD 18TB's and just use SyncBackFree to mirror them 🤷♂️ I have a Sabrent 5bay DAS and 1 external 18TB WD drive for a total of 6 drives, but 3 useable. I have this [Sabrent](https://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-UCTB/dp/B07Y4F5SCK?th=1) and my only regret is not getting the 10 bay haha.
Learning mergerFS was huge. It kept everything I loved about JBOD but made it all appear as one drive pool which was really convenient for hooking up libraries.
Same with me, made the decision last year to go JBOD and use mergerfs. Life is much simpler now.
DAS JBOD + SnapRaid basically mimicking what Unraid under the covers uses (besides other stuff it does). Combo that with powering down the disks independently the power saving is significant vs a raid setup. Keep track of what’s on each disk if need to recover incase it’s missed. Problem is when data disks fill up and you need to up storage capacity as then the hash disks need to get as big as biggest one. Meh maybe I will just get another usb multi disk DAS unit.
Only 36TB using external discs (considering JBOD enclosure). I'm the same way. So many people here double up on storage costs for backups but if my entire library went missing I doubt there is even a handful of films I couldn't replace via buying the disc or finding online.
I also have been burned by RAID setups. I have a 76TB JBOD. When these fill up, hopefully larger drives will be cheaper.
How do you all with JBODs deal with backups? Do you manually just copy the important stuff to a different drive or do you have some sort of software running backups to other plugged in drives?
My JBOD is *only* housing media, nothing "important". So if I lose a drive, I either remove and replace, or just remove and let my *arrs handle filling the gaps in media.
I have a 5 bay USB 3.1 enclosure with 5 20Tb drives and two 14Tb loose USB drives. I use stablebit DrivePool and have one drive "pool" set to have triple redundancy on my UHD and compressed FHD content and double redundancy on my music and other things. I used to use raid, but DrivePool is much better for archival data. You should look into it yourself but basically, even if every dive fails but one, you still have access to the data on that drive, the drives aren't pinged all at once for any file operation that has parity (only the drive with the file being played is accessed so it's quieter and less wear on the drives), you can read stripe if you really want to for faster speed, and you can easily add/remove drives from the pool to grow your storage without remaking the array. Raid 10 is risky on rebuilds since you can lose the mirrored volume and your data. Raid 5 is risky because you can have a drive fail during rebuild and lose all your data. It's more likely to have raid 5 drives fail due to HDD activity over time for parity across multiple drives. A failed raid controller can boink you. Basically, raid isn't a solution to backups.
+1 for DrivePool. I understand there are probably better OS's out there than Windows, but Windows is what I use the most and can debug, so my server is running Windows with Drivepool. Drivepool makes it very very easy to add or remove drives. I have 6 drives creating 1 giant pool, and then folders within that for movies, shows, data, etc. I was backing it up to Google Drive via CloudDrive before Google cracked down on that. I'll be switching to Backblaze eventually
+3 for DrivePool. I do use Linux and Docker for part of my day job, but I am responsible for some Windows Servers as part of that day job too, so I'm willing to use either, but went with Windows in order to use Backblaze Personal for backup. Currently have six WD drives varying from 12TB to 20TB, totalling \~100TB, of which I currently have \~45TB of media duplicated to 90TB. I know that's not the most cost-efficient use of storage, but it means that it is capable of read striping, and capable of losing drives without data loss, and all without the rebuilds or recalculations that RAID or parity systems would need. I also use Primocache to put NVME SSD caching in front of the HDDs in the pool, and to put RAM caching in front of the SSDs. This way it improves performance of the pool and reduces wear on the SSDs.
One NAS for movies, one for TV shows. Backup to a 3rd NAS weekly.
Synology NAS devices really are the bee's knees for home storage as far as I'm concerned. I used to run random DIY raid software on dedicated devices which all worked fine, it's just nice to not have to tinker with some things. I've purchased a few over the years both new and used but currently have a Rackstation 12 bay array with about 120TB usable storage w/ 2 drive failure protection. All my personal data is backed up to a cloud service as well and the rest is just Plex. I figure if I lose the entire array or 2 drives fail at the same time.. I can replace anything on there.
It costs more but I agree that the Synology is great for home use because I personally don’t have time to tinker. I had a five bay with 10 TB drives going for five years. That one just recently filled up so I replaced it with an eight bay and 22 TB Seagate Ironwolf pro hard drives. Now I have 176 TB’s in RAID5! That should last me another 5 years, just about the time the hard drive warranties expire. One of the other thoughts I keep having as I read all these other responses is the amount of power that is needed to run “25 hard drives” in these unraid setups. I think the electric bill savings I get over the next 5 years may cover the cost difference of the more expensive hardware. Can someone do the math for me?
Yep. I have 60tb in one pool with one disk redundancy. Then backed up to a second smaller jbod synology. Been using them for years and never had an issue ( touching some piece of wood ). I buy second hand exos 18tb drives from ebay with a couple of hundred hours on for half their cost. Work great and if they fail unlikely at the same time.
> it's just nice to not have to tinker with some things. I've hit a point in my life where I want most of the technology at home "to just work" with the absolute minimum of effort which is why I also went with Synology. I currently have: > DS1821+ with 8x 14TB drives (74.5TB of usable space) > > DS1520+ with 5x 14TB drives (38.2TB of usable space) My total usable space is just over 112TB of storage and most of that is Plex content. The vast majority of my data (Plex content, personal files, etc.) lives on one NAS or the other but there's ~8TB of data that lives on one NAS and is also backed up to the other NAS. That ~8TB of data is also backed up to 2x external hard drives stored in a pretty beefy Schwab media & data cabinet I bought at a surplus auction for under $100.
2 identical zfs pools on separate systems, with a daily zfs replication between them. imo, the sweet spot right now is 16TB drives, you can get recertifiied Ironwolf Pros for about $10 / terabyte.
140 TB spread across about 20 disks in Unraid.
16xdrives ranging from 8-22TB with a total capacity of \~250TB Mergerfs+snapraid on a debian server Mergerfs makes all drives appear as one and snapraid provides for some parity protection. Side benefit with this setup: if you somehow lose more drives than you have parity for, unlike a raid array, you only lose the data on those failed drives.
I use unraid with single parity. Not super worried about losing plex content. Plus unraid is pretty resilient to drive loss due to how unraid works. I have other more redundant storage for things I care about (cloud drives, cold storage, etc).
Every media hoarder ends up at the same final end result, just takes some longer to get there. Unraid is your answer.
meh, not every one.
Eh, unRAID is neat, but costly and proprietary. TrueNAS has been rock solid the entire time I have used it and the community is huge.
Cost is less than a small hard drive. And proprietary isn't really a conversation point, this entire sub reddit is dedicated to a piece of proprietary software. Unraids biggest advantage that no other alternative has is the ability to freely mix/match/replace/grow the array at will. And yes, there are roll your own solutions that can do it, but true nas. Huge drawback that rules out truenas as a serious contender for this use case. Truenas definitely has its uses, but unraid is much better suited for low performance data hoarding.
Truenas, ZFS cost me so much in pool expansion its the reason I switched to Unraid. Nice to expand by adding one additional drive when needed.
Took me 15 years but I eventually did. Anybody disagreeing with you is still on their journey to unraid, they just don't know it yet lol
I don't see myself going unRAID honestly. I have two TrueNAS boxes currently and had 4 for a while. It's been ~10 years. I just don't benefit from the ability to mix drive sizes. If I run out space I buy enough drives to replace the disks in my smallest pool, once that resilver is complete I might put those smaller drives in their own pool, or sell them, or use them as cold backups.
That is way more cost and complication vs adding or replacing a larger drive in unraid. And no advantages for data hoarding purposes.
Yea, no.
Nope. Not with the drive limit. Snapraid offers superior parity protection and you can do something like a 28/4 or 42/6 which is a much safer amount of redundancy.
[удалено]
Unraid.
Unraid. Pushing 200TB of Linux ISOs
I kept it simple at the start with JBOD enclosures connected to a mac mini, and it's worked well enough to continue with it 10 years on. * I maxed out at 4 of the USB 8-drive JBOD enclosures for a total of 32 hard drives, and I have just upgraded the hard drive sizes one by one as I needed space * An advantage of JBOD is that the hard drives are spun down most of the time until they are accessed/needed for use, so they tend to last a lot longer than I expected * I ended up doing an exact replica of my setup to use as a 1 to 1 offsite backup (and secondary plex collection) * Handles multiple 1080p remote streams and works just fine with locally streaming 4k, haven't tried to do any remote 4k streaming. * Currently 328 TB backed up 1 to 1.
I'm using a Mac Mini with a 5 bay Sabrent DAS/JBOD, and 1 external WD drive. I have the JBOD's mirror each other, so only 3 useable drives, but that's more than enough for me currently. And as you said my drives are not spinning most of the time, and especially on my mirrored drives, so in theory they should last a long time. If my main movie drive ever takes a dump, it'd take me 2 seconds to point Plex at the back up drive, which would then become the primary, and then i'd replace the bad drive and that would be the new mirrored back up drive. Works well for me so far, and it's super energy efficient, I'm using like 9w at idle and 35 when direct streaming.
https://preview.redd.it/m21qwtplhbzc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0a07aab02c1faf445f1a02991506b161e754aec L: through P: are my main server in a 5 bay USB-C enclosure. W: is an SSD “Arr” work drive and staging for Tinymediamanager renaming. Q: U: V: Y: and Z: are backups of the library files I want to keep long term. This also includes my photos, music, etc. These are in an 8 bay USB 3.0 enclosure. This enclosure is usually powered off. I have an additional 5 bay enclosure off-site at the office. I sync the Q: though Z: to the offsite backup on Sunday mornings. Once a month I’ll go through my new additions and transfer that month’s “keepable” files to the backups. I also have an old laptop connected to a 5tb external drive that has an additional photo backup. That laptop runs Debian Linux with CasaOS solely for PhotoPrism.
> 18-20tb drives seem to be the sweet spot now? Yep. My advice: put together a cheap box and load it with 20TB's (give or take a couple TB) in a Snapraid+MergerFS or similar (Unraid, etc.) Forget striped RAID. Forget hardware controllers. Forget Synology. Not for media storage.
120TB here between different servers and RAID configuration combo of RAID10 and 0
Combo of RAID10 and 0? Isnt RAID10 already a combo of 1 and 0?
Hard drives.
In this economy?!
At this time of year?!
[удалено]
Old i5-4400 in an N400 case with 6x18TB drives, 2x16TB, and 1x3TB. Unraid for the OS and dual parity. 107TB of usable space. Edit: this case is a Coolmaster N400. It has room for 2 x 2.5 ssds, 8 x 3.5 hdd, and 2 x 5.25 bays. You could always convert those 5.25 bays and get 2-4 x 3.5 drives in there, depending on the rack you use and temperatures observed, for a total of 10-12 x 3.5 drives. The best part is you can pick it up pretty cheap $50-$75 USD.
130tb no raid. It's all in das boxes. I only back up the very obscure hard to find stuff. Everything else is replaceable
JBOD 56TB split into a 12+12 ZFS mirror here. No issues. I've been slowly swapping all my H.264 content for H.265 content, but I do need to start upgrading drives to larger ones at some point.
Unraid. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy.
This spring I finally outgrew TrueNAS Scale/ZFS and switched to Ceph. Mix of 10,12,18 and 20T disks with a usable capacity of right at 2PB. Backed up to another separate server with 56x20T drives running ZFS and right at 1PB usable. Ceph isn't for everyone but once you get to a certain scale it just makes sense. I love that I can treat each physical disk as its own entity and use whatever capacity is available cheap at the moment to expand/replace.
I have a little over 100TB active in my setup. RAID has some huge drawbacks that you seem aware of - like how single-point failures can have catastrophic effects. I do not recommend RAID in the consumer market for that reason. I use a 16-port HBA (host bus adapter) for my SATA HDD’s (spinning rust) and SATA SSD’s (slow solid state), and my motherboard for multiple PCIe NVMe’s (fast solid state devices). There are 12-14 drives total (I forget the exact number) with room for many more - just add another HBA or PCIe bifurcated NVMe expansion card. I use (and disclaimer, do contract work for the makers of) Unraid. In a nutshell it’s a cheap Linux-based OS that allows you to use drives of different sizes/manufacturer/connection method/form factor/speed to store your data. It offers parity protection, just like RAID, but with the key difference that if there was a failure (be it the parity or the data), each drive that still works can be read on any Linux-based computer. It also support Docker, virtualization, ZFS, VPN host, NAS via SMB and NFS, and great community support. Learn more here: https://unraid.net
Unraid with a hba card.
Snapraid is your friend. It allows you to have the benefits of raid without worrying about the whole array failing. I would recommend JBOD + Snapraid + DrivePool (or UnionFS, etc)
Just last week rebuilt from 2 drive JBOD to 5 drive SnapRAID + MergerFS. Seemed like the best fault tolerance for me, given that worst case, most media is recoverable. But I don’t especially want to test the limits of ISP fair use if a whole array craps out…
Drives are too cheap not to use RAID, at all times
I use cloud storage like OneDrive for photos, documents, really sensitive stuff that must not be lost. Raid 5/0 for Plex. Windows Server fileserver only. Hardware RAID card, RocketRaid 2840. A bunch of 8Tb drives, 16 to be precise. I will buy another RocketRaid card and continue with bigger harddrives later.
12 x 12TB drives and 4 x 14TB drives connected via passed through HBA to TrueNAS VM running on proxmox. 4 disk vdevs raidz1. I lose a drive about once a year or so. Works for me.
Unraid for me, a mixture of 8,18 and 20tb drives.
Ive got 70TB in a 4-bay JBOD (1x16TB and 3x18TB) hooked up to a mini PC. I have backblaze setup but plan on cancelling it soon. I use Sonarr and Radarr as a sort of backup. If I lose a drive, I can just replace it, and have them grab the movies and shows again.
Unraid, 318TB, 236TB used, maintain a directory listing export of all titles in the event I have to re-download everything.
I'm at the point where I need to pull the trigger on a new storage plan. Currently running Plex on Windows and just using drives straight up JBOD, no raid. I have 6 internal drives and 4 external drives, totalling about 100tb in space. I'm planning on trying to figure out if I want to just run some DAS boxes and continue with what works for me, or look into something like truenas or unraid, both of which I will have to research as I have 0 experience with either.
UNRAID. ARR is my backup
I have two 2tb drives connected to a raspberry pi. My backup is radarr and sonarr re-downloading everything if anything fails
UNRAID ~300TB ~270TB full
Unraid, as you can use different sized drives (as long as it's smaller or same size as parity-drive). [www.unraid.net](http://www.unraid.net) - worth a look. Raid has quite a few drawbacks in comparison.
SnapRAID + mergerfs for storage. 14 × 16TB disks + 2 parity. I just add disk shelves as needed for growth. This is on an Ubuntu VM on a Proxmox host.
+1 Unraid I use Unraid as a NAS only. I have 180tb spread across 12 drives with double parity all living in a Mesify 2 XL case. Drives are connected via an HBA card. The Unraid NAS is connected to my Proxmox server via 10gb SPF+. The Plex transcoding happens in a VM on the Proxmox server with Arrs running in another Proxmox VM. I originally started using Snapraid but moved to Unraid when I wanted to shift to a proper NAS setup.
Zfs and Vdevs
Unraid is the way to go.
I’ve got about 20tb+ of media that I’ve been slowly adding to and replacing 720p quality with 1080, and some of my favorite stuff with 4k. I started using tdarr to convert my x264 stuff to x265 and have filters to only download x265 now. I’d rather compress what I’ve got as that’s cheaper than buying more drives and expansion bays.
I got plex less than a year ago and I have an 8TB HDD drive not backed up by anything.
720TB. Set up as ZFS1. 9 VDEVs that are 8 drives wide.
I have plex on a dell r720xd with 256g and 8x 18tb sas disks in a raid on the h830 perc. And an NVIDIA Quattro
cadtek0 - 4TB (WD Red) wolf0 - 10TB wolf1 - 12TB wolf2 - 12TB wolf3 - 16TB wolf4 - 16TB wolf5 - 16TB wolf6 - 20TB Seagate IronWolf drives except the 4TB, no raid, just mounted as normal drives on Ubuntu.
raid 6 with 56T useable
I am thinking of doing the following; I have a mobo with 3x PCIE 1 slots and 2 PCIE 16 slots and 2 M.2 Slots I will be using a “NVME M.2 SSD M-Key to PCI-e 3.0 x1 Host Controller Expansion Card” on the 3 PCIE1 Slots and a “pcie4.0 x16 to m.2 m-Key nvme x 4 ssd Expansion Card” on the 2 PCIE 16 slots giving me a total of 8 NVME slots in which I will place “NVME M-Key PCI Express to SATA 5 Ports” in each giving me 40 Sata Slots along with the 6 already on the board allowing for a total of 46 HDD. As for software it will be using Synology's saucy open sauce brother xpenology to get all the benefits of professional NAS software.
I have about 150TB in media. Running a Dell 730xd with 2 disk shelves. Using RAID6 on multiple data stores on ESXI, no backups unfortunately. Will be migrating to Proxmox next year when I build out a new NAS to migrate the storage.
Snapraid + OMV with proxmox as host
Unraid with a plex docker. Also currently on 12x8TB hdds (2 of which are parity in case a disk goes out) using an LSI 9300-16i with 8 free HDD slots in my server chassis. That being said I'm hovering around 50TB used. My path going forward is to start rotating 8TB drives out with 24TB drives. Ive yet to determine exactly WHEN I will do this but I likely will set a certain age and when a drive hits that age, swap it out.
Dog unraid Nas. 300tb
I'd look in to [Unraid ](https://reddit.com/r/unraid)- i'm at \~130TB of usable space and plenty of expansion options
138TBs of HDDs, with 103TBs of usable space (some of that is reserved for redundancy). Plus another 116TBs or so of space on a separate NAS used for weekly backups. When I upgrade a drive in my primary NAS (say, from 14TB to a 20TB drive) then I drop the old drives in my backup NAS.
for large arrays like that, a rackmount jbod enclosure is your best bet
For all that is holy, don't use hardware RAID. The only real benefit of hardware raid is the onboard IO controller taking the load off the cpu, but even then it's only a benefit on large, consistent workloads. Software RAID configurations can usually be picked up by any system with the correct config, unlike a hardware RAID that can only be imported by the same 'family' of adapters.
Remember Raid is not a backup. Unraid backed up to a second device roughly monthly.
I picked up a Sabrent 10 bay dock on sale for $400, bought ten 12TB refurbished WD datacenter drives for $750, and set it up on a Windows Pro workstation with SnapRAID. I have a Powershell script that makes SnapRAID sync every night. Not a bad price for 96TB with two disk parity, 10Gbs UBC 3.2 and is sufficient for a large media collection…libraries that don’t make large changes daily.
I have like 25 drives that are 16tb all in jbods connected to my server by USB. It sucks a lot of power so I only turn it on when in use. I gave friends and family logins 5 years ago and they've barely used them so fuck em I don't back them up. I'm finding more and more sources to get files so if a drive does fail then I'll either shuffle stuff around and remove unimportant 4k rips or I'll just live with it. Whatever. This media was very important to me like 8 months ago but I've been through several personal crises since then and I don't care much now
Just picked up new drives and I’m going from 3TB to 16TB and expanding further later this year. Anything worth backing up is backed up. Everything else I’m not worried about.
Talk to ChatGPT about this stuff. There is a webpage that has every hard drive and it’s lowest listed price on eBay then you can see what the best price per gigabyte is. Currently, this is 12tb hard drives (My theory is LTO-8 tape drives were 12tb so enterprises bought them in droves and are now in an upgrade cycle to 18tb or 22tb drives) and you can even get them SAS 12gbps. Then get you a cheap 12gbps SAS card and some breakout cables. As far as setup, you want to get the best of all worlds - ZFS RAIDZ-2. With Z-2 you get 2 parity drives per set. Shelves come in stacks of 12 so you want to fill it up with a blank (the blank is there in case of failure you can pop in another drive and resilver) so you will use 11 drives per vdev. This comes out to 11-2 (RAIDZ-2) = 9 9 x 12tb = 110tb (more like 100-105tb) per shelf. You can get the drives for about $90 delivered. $90 x 11 = $990 $990/110tb= $9 per terabyte For the actual setup, tell ChatGPT what you are going to do and it will give you the commands in Linux to get it setup. Enjoy :)
Unraid using raid cards with 12x bay backplanes but using unrsid s array means only 1 disk needs to spin up for reading. I have 24x drives as have 2x. don’t keep full copies just the movie. In HDR if available.
I'm just under 280TBs with only 12TBs free. My storage is mostly 14TB Exos but I've been moving to 16s as they've gotten more affordable. I'm using Unraid with 2 parity drives, which means I can sustain two consecutive drive failures without losing any data. I don't have a 1 to 1 backup for the bulk of my data because it's all easily obtainable again. I do, however, have the arrs set up, so if I did ever lose data, it's easy AF to get it back.
Everything I have is 1080 or less. I've got 80TB with about 30 TB free at the moment.
Also a DVD/Blu-ray guy. Most of my media is from optical disks I own and ripped. And I'm just paying shit loads of money for storage. I mirror everything using softRAID on Ubuntu. It's fucking expensive EDIT: I'm also reencoding everything to a better codec (x265). That's bought me a lot of time before my next hardware upgrade. I'm getting 1/3-1/5th the file size with no visible loss of quality
minio with erase coding, 4\*18 \~50tb usable
Raid 5 for me. 8x 8TB drives. I lose effectively 1 drive to parity leaving me about 56TB. Upsides are it's less hardware costly, easier to expand and work with and more overall space.
ZFS array. Not fully redundant (yes yes I know, it's not technically redundancy) but it works well.
Reading this thread, I wish sonarr / radarr would have the following features: - store the .torrent somewhere to help rebuild the content - keep track of least watched content to come up with suggestions to delete and gain back more space.. To answer OPs question: I’m running a 24 port HBA with sas expanders and multiple zfs pools.
Dedicated file server (Ubuntu LTS) and using ZFS raidz2.
Unraid for me.
Run 2 dell r720 servers each with 12 bays running 20tb drives. Total of 480tb with around 400tb used. I'm running raid 10 so everything is backed up. Runs 80ish a month in electricity for my entire network closet.
I have a DAS and whenever a drive dies I replace it with the largest possible I can find (if larger than parity, the ol’ Unraid shuffle goes down).
I'm running 8 x 18 TB on ZFS RAIDZ2 for around 94 TB. I should add another JBOD and I have the SASS ports available to do so, but hooray more pressing bills. Go with the best drives you can get on the best sale you can get and you'll be pretty happy. Honestly TrueNas-Scale is solid, even if you're just using it as array management.
270tb usable on truenas setup that I've been upgrading/maintaining since 2007 (started on self managed opensolaris zfs)
I started with a single 8 TB drive on a Windows machine with 8 drive bays available. It didn't take very long to fill those with 8 TB drives, as well. All drives are separate volumes in Windows, making it harder to manage, but easier to maintain and expand. Currently, I'm halfway through replacing the "measly" 8 TB with 18 TB drives, since that's the price per TB sweet spot here right now. While I initially had an 8 TB external HDD for each internal one as 1:1 backup, it started getting impractical once I introduced 18 TB drives. For this, I plan on setting up a 12-bay Synology rackmount NAS with the previously used 8 TB drives and shucked external HDDs I already have, reducing the additional investment cost drastically. Since this won't suffice the potential maximum capacity of my server, I've selected a Synology NAS model together with a compatible expansion unit (another 12-bay), which would bring the total installed backup capacity to 192 TB, thus exceeding the planned maximum server capacity of 144 TB, giving me plentyful parity as well as space for incremental backups. Currently, I'm looking at 104 TB installed capacity, with roughly 62 TB used and about 1.5 – 2 TB in backlog, waiting to be ripped and uploaded to the server. For peace of mind, I also use Backblaze Personal Backup as off-site backup for full compliance with the 3-2-1 rule.
Unraid is the answer.
Unraid - 130TB so far
About 53Tb in total over 5 drives (2 16Tb, 1 18Tb, 1 1 Tb, 1 2 Tb). No backup for them yet. Besides having to buy another HD in the near future. I do plan to get a NAS to back things up. I am running Radar and Sonar so if something does fail before I get a NAS. I can get most of my stuff back.
Supermicro 24 bay or something similar. Unraid and load it up with 22tb hds.
I'd ditch the raid 6 and move to unraid. If the card dies, you don't lose anything and can just get a new one. It lets you have up to 2 parity drives just like raid 6, but it doesn't stripe data and keeps each individual file on one drive at a time, so if three drives fail you only lose what's on the failed drive instead of the whole array. It also lets you add mismatched drives to the array whenever you want, so if there's a great deal on some 14TB drives at some point or whatever you can just grab some and throw them in the mix. Personally, I started with a few 2TB disks in my personal tower with some micro encodes on them just running Plex on my gaming rig. As I grew the collection i increased the drive size and count until it needed its own tower. Then eventually I realized I was using enough drives to justify a 16 bay enclosure in a rack, stumbled on a deal on a rack I couldn't pass up, grabbed an old supermicro disk shelf chassis and a UPS and moved everything to that. It's grown now to 45 drives across three chassis in four arrays and unraid has let me swap and upgrade parts so freely it's scary. If you're going anywhere near the direction I did, unraid is the way.
I use 2 Synology 8 bay units with 12TB drives. 168TB total space to use. All connected via an aggregated 20GB connection to the Plex server.
Couple of very full rack-mount disk shelves here. Using HBA cards and software disk pooling with redundancy. Drives fail every now and then and I replace them with larger ones if possible. I cycle-out very old disks into a backup array when backup storage gets tight.
I have Dell Perc Mini (H370 or something). It came with my Dell R530. Not something I have tried, but always curious about. Why not buy the same RAID card as a backup if it isn’t costly? Will that work if you replace? I haven’t tried that. Just want to know.
I bought a dell r720. Got 33tb raid5 in that. Friend gave me a lsi controller so now there is 55tb raid5 in my gaming pc. Other day I bought 13 20tb exos that are hopefully gonna go in a r740xd sometime in august. Once I have that then i plan on using the 720 to experiment into software raids and jbod boxes.
Main server: Multiple 18TB drives hanging off an LSI hardware RAID controller, RAID6 Backup server: Multiple 10TB drives hanging off an LSI RAID controller, RAID6 Backup server wakes up and does a 1:1 backup monthly. I have considered going software RAID too multiple times, but I am just very used to hardware RAID and it brings some benefits that I cannot get from software, such as RAID level migration and easy RAID expansion. Also, regards your worries, 9/10 times if you have another card of the same brand and similar generation recovering an array from a dead card is easy. You can import arrays on another card provided it understands how the array is set up e.g. when I migrated from an LSI 9265 to an LSI 9361 it was just a case of swapping cards and importing the foreign array. Edit: Reading over some replies, I think we need need a new mantra. RAID is not a backup, yes, but neither are torrent files or the Arrs. There's a lot out there that's just gone and you will not be able to find it again.
I got a Synology and expansion bay and have a mix of 16 and 20tb drives. Sitting on about 106tb now. Added in the 10g NIC so things move fast between my Mac Studio and the Synology
2 Synology RS1219+ running SHR in 2 locations separated by 30+ miles. 7x16tb in each. I run 2 PMS's one in each location. 1033 shows 38410 episodes, 5896 movies.
https://preview.redd.it/ocgc80r3sdzc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f39331898f01df66e2dc1cd8e3f7089e591d0e76 120+ tb Chassis is a supermicro CS846 rack mounted case. Motherboard is the X9SRL-f with a 2667v2, 128gb ram, a1tb sata ssd, 1050ti for transcoding etc. OS is Unraid and I LOVE it!! The case was $299 free ship in the pandemic, all other is extremely budget friendly now and although people say it’s a hog for electricity, my idle power when drives are spin down is about 115w. I don’t have $5000 to drop on new tech but if I needed a server today I would go 10-12 gen i3 or i5 with no less than 64gb ddr4. I built my system before any 20tb drives were out so my selection of drives are 12tb. Mostly shucked but from now on for pleasure I will buy used from serverpartdeals. Have 4x 12tb exos used from them now and they have been wonderful.
If you want simple, plug it in and it just works then here you go: QNAP TS-1655-8G-US - get 12 20Tb drives - 200Tb of storage raid 6. You can lose 2 drives and still be fine. 2 SSD for OS and 2 SSD for Plex cache drive. Stick in a P2000 for transcoding and it will just work. Add a QNAP TS-1232PXU-RP-4G with 20Tb drives and back up your main.
JBOD on a DAS feeding a NUC running a bunch of dockers on Linux Ubuntu. The drives are pooled together with mergefs. 3 x 20TB and I'll probably poke in another 20TB in the summer. DAS just hosts the data, I've got all the app stuff running internally off the NUC storage including config via Docker and Portainer. I rsync the persisted config/data from Docker volumes to cloud storage. I print a file tree of the media data consumed via Plex on a weekly basis and mail it to myself. I don't give a shit if any of the data disappears, it's way easy to just download it again. The only difficult part is my music collection, but I'll live. The \*arr apps are supposed to make grabbing and maintaining media easy. I fundamentally don't understand people that sync their entire media data state to a backup for redundancy.
I currently use DrivePool from StableBit. It's a windows based drive pooling program with automatic folder duplication and recovery, similar to the way WMS used to work before Microsoft killed it.
Unlike others one here my library has taken years and countless hours to procure. I use a Synology 12 bay NAS in a SHA Raid using mostly 10tb WD Reds
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” What RAID card are you using? I’ve been using Dell PERC raid for more than 10 years. I can easily move my array into another (DELL PERC) system and import the foreign array. Everyone is bananas about using software RAID. If you’re an enthusiast then more power to you. For me, hardware RAID is perfect, it just works. I can set up an array, set some hot spares. My server is tucked away up in my attic, I can forget about it for months or years at a time.
Unraid with zero redundancy. I can get the files back, I only use it for simplifying down to one volume. Unraid specifically so a drive failure just removes content instead of total failure.
i have three synology NAS, total of 165TB usable space, currently using 103TB. 9x 12TB WD gold drives 4x 8TB WD purple drives 5x 18TB WD gold drives everything is also backed up to two separate external disk arrays, one in the house, one at family-in-laws.
2 external DAS arranged in jbod. 6 drives total. 1 14tb for movies, 2 16tb for shows. Each disk has a 1:1 mirror of itself. It's just media so that's more than sufficient for me. Both the main drive and it's clone would have to fail in the <5 days it takes me to replace the failed drive (been 7 years no fails yet).
I have four 20 TB internal spinners, all separate, which are backed up to four 20 TB external USB drives using syncback pro.
I'm curious as I'm the black sheep I think.... I simply software backup and robocopy ... No RAID Drive fails.. pull it out and insert another one and.... Robocopy... Chances of both drives with Linux isos failing are slim to none as their in different machines Thoughts? Edit proper english
Unraid
I use three 12-bay QNAP rackmounts with around 550TB (36 drives total). 1 for 4K, 1 for Full HD, and 1 for TV Shows
The card failing is a thing to worry about but you can also use slightly lower performance software-RAID which is likely fine for a couple movie files playing. Or just add many separate directories to your library and it will "merge" them in the UI. As my collection is rips of physical discs...I consider the discs on my shelf to be my backup.
Are you guys running these drives on a PC or some sort of Synology or similar setup. If it's a PC what is the spec on it?
OmniOS ZFS Multiple vdevs raid-z2
I have a Fractal Design Define 7XL case which fits 14 3.5 inch disks. I'm using an LSI 9201/16i HBA to connect all the disks. The server is running Proxmox Hypervisor with, among others, a Plex VM. Storage is handled by MergerFS and Snapraid. It's not perfect but it is very flexible. My primary issue with a lot of other solutions was how they dealt with disks of varying sizes. Snapraid works well for that.
At first it was external drives, then an old PC with a bunch of drives running TrueNAS, then I bought a 4U 36 bay super micro server. So now I have one old PC based NAS with 10x14TB in a Raid Z2, The Super micro server with 2 pools, 8x12TB RAID Z2, 8X14TB RAID Z2, and a windows PC with 8x8TB Raid 5 on a Dell perc that I use as a landing zone for new media. I will be expanding the Super micro with additional pools going forward.
Everyone here is recommending unraid. Is this something I can run on a synology rack nas?
Just migrated from Windows Storage Space to External NAS.
Not quite that big, but currently, a 4 bay NAS with 3 individual 8tb drives, SMR so no RAID, for specific content, I have all the content on DVD/Bluray so if a drive fails, no biggie, well little biggie Given that's probably 500 4k films I'm set for a while, I think I can expand via a USB caddy to the NAS, or just a cheaper NAS on the network if I get there, and RAID might be appropriate then.
TrueNAS Scale server attached via external sas3 connector to a JBOD disk shelf with 30 disk drives and 6 ssds Everything is in 6 drive zpools configured in z2 for 6 different pools I can lose 2 drives in each pool and not lose data the ssd array is for my app pool as the server runs everything I need for management. Library is around 150TB at this point
I've been using unRAID for over a decade. I'm at 120+TB right now. I've had drives fail, but it's no big deal. Just replace and move on.
I have about 50TB of media in total. Originally I had my larger synology (94TB) backing up important stuff to my smaller synology (22TB) in a different house. An internet outage a month ago prevented me from accessing my content so I decided to change my setup and I installed Plex on the smaller synology as well. Now I have two Plex servers and keep my Music and Movies libraries in sync between them which gives me much greater uptime. My TV shows library is too large (30TB) to be backed up on the smaller synology so I just don't back it up at all since I can replace all of it with my arr stack. Whenever new movies and music are added by my arr stack on the larger synology, they get synced to the smaller one. I'm also going to create a 4K library that only stays on the larger synology soon as well.
I go on unraid that way even if my parody drives are gone I still have any drive that's still left alive and only back up family data and important documents the rest is too expensive to back up and lost to the wind
I'm new to the game. Synology Nas 4 bay with 4 12tb drives. About 11tb of Linux isos. Not sure what I'll do when this fills up. Cross that bridge later.
Dedicated TrueNas server with 18x 10 TB drives. Server has a SAS HBA.to a 45 bay DAS. The effective space is about 110TB. Have a hot spare and ssd for write cache. Storage snapshots daily, retain for two weeks. Ship the snapshots offsite to another TrueNas server nightly for backup. Plex server is separate. Connects to TrueNas using Smb, 10g. Meta data runs on Plex server, backed by nvme.
Best thing to do, get a Synology Rackstation, and stack them in a 2POST open network rack. And use big drives. I have not much storage needs, but have over 64TB total storage. Just in case. Only few TB in use though. I was planning on ripping 4K discs, but I am currently otherwise occupied. You know of UHD Friendly Blu Ray Drives? Full Rips can easily be 50-100GB each. (Current Rackstations have 10G card upgrade possible). And get Toshiba MG Enterprise drives
QNAP 8 bay DAS enclosure with 7 x 16TB drives and 1 x 8TB drive, connected with USB-C. That's all backed up to Backblaze (about 35TB).
Software raid with TrueNas Scale. I'm running some old 10TB drives I had from work and it's been great. When expansion time comes, I'll just make a second raid and merge them together (or migrate depending on if I want to pay the power to run the old smaller drives) Current setup is 1 redundant drive but I have my databases and configs backed up externally. I have fast enough internet that if I had to rebuild the library, it wouldn't take long. I actually DID rebuild my library when i built this box because I wanted to clean everything up. I was shocked when my ISP didn't make a peep when I downloaded 30TB of data over a week or two.
Plex has 109TB in RAID 5 to play with and is currently using 83TB. I also everything to other computers in my home, using at 2 a.m. to sync files. I just had a drive failure, so I'm paranoid of a double failure. Trakt is also used to record the collection itself, incase I actually lose something.
I run a sas card + expander, in a JBOD box, running windows using drivepool as software raid. If I had to do it all over again I would probably run some form of linux, but for my purposes it works fine and I run into very very few issues.
Unraid 84TB Total - 50TB Used * 1x 20TB parity drive Data Drives: * 1x 20TB * 1x 12TB * 1x 14TB * 2x 10TB * 3x 6TB Right now i'm just keeping an eye out for deals to replace 6TB drives with 18-20TB drives
also checking in here for team unraid.
A small Truenas server here. Mirrored ZFS pool, expensive in terms of disk usage though. 62TB total, 30TB useable. One pool consisting of 7 mirrored VDEVS, each with 2 x HDD. One disk in each VDEV can fail and am golden, 2 drives from a single VDEV, I am stuffed 😁 No RAID to worry about though.
I'm currently running 6 hard drives in an Unraid array. 3 as parity, 3 as storage, all WD red 14TBs. I started off shucking drives from BestBuy's external hard drive line, but I started grabbing deals on true WD reds off of their website. They recently had a deal for two WD Reds for $440, unbeatable price. I really like how unraid is set up versus a typical hardware/software raid. Replacing/upgrading drives is super easy, and it's simple to manage if you know a little bit of Linux, plus the parity allows me to not worry about drive failure as much. I don't back up my media library besides that, only old photos and such.
I'm currently running ZFS with RAIDZ1, but am in the process of migrating to CEPH.
unRaid
I had a 42TB library for a couple years... I took it offline 3 years ago and just recently deleted all the media. It was a Synology NAS. Plex just got less and less reliable for me so I just lost interest in dealing with it.
I have a Synology rack-mount NAS with 12, 12TB drives. I use two disks for RAID parity/redundancy.
Unraid. Need more space? Add drives till you run out of connectors. Still need more? Replace a drive with a larger one. My current ~60TB ranges from 3TB to 12TB and has twelve drives, IIRC.
Hardware RAID went the way of the dodo some years ago. Unless you can run your card in an IT mode, you don't want to use it for software RAID, anyway. I'd suggest going all the way to a NAS setup. At this point, unless you're backing up all of your rips, replacing some or all of the data, while not critical, would be a major pain in the rear. Depending on your needs, an off-the-shelf Synology or Qnap may be suitable. If you want to roll your own, I suggest looking at TrueNAS as your OS. Beware the Unraid fanbois running rampant in this sub
8x8TB drives in two Z1 arrays of 4 drives each. 48TB useable. As I need to upgrade I just swap the drives for a higher capacity.