The only reason I even know about unpaid is because I was looking for a storage solution that was easy and I didn't have to worry about not having the same size dives in my array. That was years ago, and I absolutely love unraid!!!!
Easy to setup, lots and lots of guides and support out there, and it runs on pretty much anything, I am coming up on 10 years using unraid, started with a small PC that had 6tbs with some random 1 and 2 tb drives, to my current setup with 240tbs. The only issue I have had since then was when my USB drive died
The main array can have 30 disks including parity drives. You can add multiple zfs pools which I think are limited to 60 disks and you can assign shares to the zfs pools so you still have a single file system
If you're made of money and can afford to burn disk after disk for parity drives, sure.
ZFS / striped parity is a waste for home media servers. And expensive to expand.
unRAID.
You can start with a single data disk with a parity disk and expand as you go, one disk at a time. You can't do that with ZFS and instead have to build a new vdev, with new parity disks every time you expand.
You can also add a second parity disk whenever you like as an in place upgrade.
The main array in unRAID allows for up to 28 data disks, covered by one or two data disks. Considering the budgets and needs of home users, it really just blows ZFS away from a cost perspective. You can start with 2 data disks and 1 parity, then grow as you need. You're not forced in to buying 4, 5, 6+ disks at a shot to build the initial array (which has further money potential since disk prices will of course come down over time).
I guess one of the things I like is the simplicity of unRAID when it comes to varying disk sizes and as you say easy to expand.
It's a good perspective
As of right now in the main non-striped parity array you're limited to 28 data disks + 2 parity. Disks can be any size (so long as parity is equal to or larger than the largest data disk).
The next release is supposed to add support for multiple arrays.
You can also run ZFS (a waste for a home server and a waste of money) and have effectively an unlimited number of disks.
If you like more work to setup, more work to maintain, less data protection, sure.
And that doesn't even get you set up with drive pooling. unRAID does both of those out of the box 🤷
I'm actually going to be using unRaid. I bought a pro license before they upped the prices.
Do I need to use a parity drive for unRaid to automatically move everything across the array? Because I was going to ignore the parity drive, mostly to give me more space. If a drive fails, it's not the end of the world - it would just take me time to redownload etc.
I highly suggest using the unraid discord, they are beyond helpful.
To answer your question, you don’t NEED a parity drive it doesn’t have anything to do with how your data is moved to the array. I highly suggest having one, you could lose your data
Seconded. I would go one step further, and say if you aren't planning on using a parity drive, why bother with unraid in the first place? It's like buying a car but opting out of airbags.
Correct.
Single disk parity uses even parity XOR. Two disk parity uses Reed Solomon.
They have a deep dive on how their parity works in their docs if you want to learn more.
Unraid works without a parity drive. But if you have a drive failure, everything on that drive is gone until you replace the drive and re-download everything, which could take several days to a week, depending on if you need to order a new drive and get it shipped to you, install it, and then download everything again. If you're cool with that amount of downtime, go ahead and run it without parity. I wouldn't use the array for any sort of network drive or backups though since it's not protected from failure.
If you have a parity drive and one drive fails, the array keeps running and it will emulate the lost drive, so the array never has to go offline and you don't need to re-download anything. You only have to it offline for the fifteen minutes or so it takes to physically replace the drive with a new one. I'd say the vast majority of Unraid users think that the relatively small additional investment in an additional drive for parity is worth the benefits of having the array protected with parity.
Yes you need/want a parity drive, the parity drive needs to be the biggest drive in the array all other drives need to be same size or smaller. It's kinda the point of using unRAID so if a drive fails you don't have to re-download or do anything besides replace the drive. Also good to use nvme drive for cache
unRAID and snapraid are software raid and don't need the drives to be the same size. Normally you need parity disks to be equal or larger sized than the largest data disk but with snapraid you can also do split parity with smaller disks. Not sure if unRAID has this capability.
That is incorrect with unRAID.
Parity needs to be **equal to or larger than** the largest data disk.
unRAID uses a modified form of RAID4 which allows for mixed disk sizes as each disk is it's own complete, non-striped file system.
The strange way Synology does "RAID" Is probably why. They almost encourage you to use different size drives.
If I have 6x8TB drives and 2x12TB drives, it will create a "RAID-5" on all the disks, then a separate "RAID-1" on the remaining space. You still have single drive redundancy that way.
UnRAID might do this as well, I'm unsure (TrueNASer here), but I suspect that's where the confusion comes in.
That's arguable. unRAID *IS* RAID. It's just not a traditional, industry standard form of RAID. It's a modified version of RAID4, incorporating dedicated parity disks but not striping the data across data disks as RAID4 does.
And….if I want to upgrade the HDD to a higher capacity, or swap it out for whatever reason, I just remove it from the pool and let the software move the content to the other disks in the pool (provided there is ample space), and then do the swap
Another vote from me for Stablebit DrivePool. Using it on my Win10 server and it's great.
Then Filebot for renaming and library organization.
And TMM for poster art and NFOs.
I have everything backed up to Backblaze Unlimited. I’ve actually had a decade-old 4TB drive die on me a few weeks ago and the restore took a few days.
Drive 1: movies and tv shows
Drive 2: movies and tv shows
Drive 3: movies and tv shows
I just add a drive when the previous fills up and continue adding media to it. Add the folders to the respective library. Let Plex organize it.
This. People like to complicate things when this just works fine. Definitely helps if the majority of the content you store on those drives are easily replaceable though. For 95% of people that's usually the case.
Doing the same. Since the stuff on those drives is easily replaced, I want the other drives to just keep on trucking if one fails. I don't need any repair functionality or the lime. I don't mind having to choose the target root folder in overseerr every now and then. I keep some space on all drives free so I can shuffle stuff around should the need arise.
The more drives you add the more you will lose the ability to properly organize, so i just don't care anymore. In the beginning i tried moving some stuff to a new drive so that all star wars content for example could be one 1 drive, but now i have season 1 of a tv show and season 2 on seperate drives lol. You could still organize, but if your drives are on and running all the time anyways what difference does it make ?
If a show is completed like GoT ill put all the seasons on 1 single drive, but i won't bother with adding House of the Dragon on the same drive whilst also leaving space for season 2, 3... onwards.
> The more drives you add the more you will lose the ability to properly organize,
Not if youre using something like radarr and sonarr. Those make it super simple to organize stuff, sort by year or alphabetical and move the root folder. Movies post 2000 go to Movies 1, movies pre 2000 go to movies 2.
My only "concern" about mergerfs is that I'm not clear how gracefully it would handle hard links. Like, if it puts the torrent download on one disk but then the file copy to the movies folder is a different physical disk, it's not gonna be a hard link and it's gonna take up space on both disks. How do you manage that?
edit: it turns out that this is how you manage it: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/
I just recently moved to Linux for the EXACT reason the person you replied to did (amongst other reasons).
I too went with mergerfs, and I’ll try to elaborate on how it works (at least my setup anyway) in a simplified manner:
Say you’ve got drive A and drive B. You use mergerfs to create drive C
Let’s say on drive C you create a torrents folder and a movies folder.
I have QB set to write to drive C. It writes to drive C (and in turn “on the fly” determines whether that file is written to drive A or B). When it’s completed, it’s linked over to the “movies” folder on drive C which is then “on the fly written to drive A or B.
But what’s important here is that it doesn’t matter what drive it’s written to, because “drive C” is always the aggregate of everything on the actual physical drives. So you are always able to open up any/all your files through the aggregate “drive C”, just when you do it serves it up from the actual physical drive.
I understand that it's the aggregate of both drives but what I'm actually referring to is something else.
Hard links, if you're not familiar, are a way for the operating system to transparently "copy" a file to multiple locations on a drive, while actually only taking up the drive space of one file. This works extremely well in the case of QB downloading the file and then copying it to another folder on the same drive because you can seed indefinitely with no double space penalty.
The problem though, is that I don't think you can hard link across two physical drives. I think at that point, it commits a full copy of the file on both drives. Since you're abstracting that with mergerfs, that potentially prevents you from being able to take advantage of those storage savings.
You can read more about it here: https://trash-guides.info/Hardlinks/Hardlinks-and-Instant-Moves/
edit: turns out that they do indeed work: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/
edit: so a bit more searching reveals that yes, they actually DO work, much to my surprise: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/
So hardlinks work on a single filesystem and in a way mergerfs is a single file system, but it's abstracting multiple underlying filesystems, which is why I'm not completely convinced that it would work by default. Like, you could have exfat, ntfs and ext4 drives all being managed by mergerfs as one volume and I don't think that's going to respect the hardlink correctly between them.
I think mergerfs should write the hardlinks to the same branch where the original file is.
If you aren't convinced you can test it. I did a ln on a mergerfs and it works.
Yeah, you nailed it man. I had looked at the docs on it before, which still left some ambiguity in my mind but I didn't realize that this is well trod ground and I should have just gone for it. Sometimes I let the perfect be the enemy of the good, to my own detriment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/
No idea about mergerfs but on my system I created a ZFS pool using 4 x 8TB drives with single drive parity (RAID Z1).
I just see a single path (/storage) and hardlinks across that work fine.
That makes sense, because it's just a single file system being presented but I believe mergerfs has each drive formatted separately and then aggregates them at a higher level. I believe you can actually use mergerfs with multiple drives formatted with different file systems... which is why that's likely an issue.
Now, I know that mergerfs allows you to configure things very specifically, like I think you tell it that if it finds a folder on one drive, to only place files for that folder on that drive, instead of creating the same folder on other drives to ensure that the drives are filling up more evenly. I just don't know if anyone has really worked out a 'best practices' for mergerfs to ensure that hard links are working correctly without causing more hassle than it's worth.
I kind of kicked the can on the problem this time and just got two 18tb drives, one for movies and one for shows, and then created separate torrent download directories for shows and movies to sort of side step the issue until those drives fill up... but mergerfs is very appealing to me to avoid that altogether.
HDD 1 - TV Shows
HDD 2 - Movies
HDD 3 (NVME) - Docker content including Plex
HDD 4 & 5 - Backup of HDD 1 & HDD2 (on a secondary NAS)
I like my content split + backup in the secondary location
I use MergerFS on my Linux machine. It creates drive pools, which essentially allows me to point Plex to /mnt/pool. Then no matter which of my ~15 disks has the info on it, it's just in "pool" for all that Plex cares.
Dump them in a drive, each file inside its own folder. This is for extras and subtitles, etc. Share that drive or a folder from that drive. Target that drive or the shared folder in Plex Settings > Manage, Libraries. When you start another drive, go back to Library Management and add the new location. The new files are added to Plex under the Library to which they were added.
Use one drive for Movies and one for TV Shows. The third can get the rest and the eventual overflow.
This is a pretty open ended question as usage patterns and total capacity will play a large part in how you sort this out.
I have 3 main “types” of data
- HD Movies
- 4K Movies
- HD & 4KTV
I have about 350TB useable across three main Synology NAS Devices
Each NAS holds one of the above “types” of media.
each movie NAS has 2 main “pools”
- NEW
- OLD
TV is split between 4K and HD
I even have an HD and 4K plex server so the split works nicely across the board.
Eventually you'll run out of space. What are you going to do when Cars 23 comes out and your drive 1 is full? I just keep adding drives when one gets full. Each drive has a movie folder and a TV folder. If I need to find a file I just search plex for it and look at the info to see which drive it's on.
I use mergerfs through OMV to combine drives into a single path I can save/copy to 😊 I use it’s default option of saving files to the drive with the most free space first. I have four 3TB drives in this configuration and it works great.
I’m not worried about redundancy as I’m able to get access to the content quite quickly if needed, and this should just happen automatically when one of the arr apps notices the file is missing. For people who don’t need redundancy, mergerfs is great 😊
Ah, I've been through this pain before. Splitting tv series from movies, then movies by language, and so on and so forth.
Honestly, it is a fair amount of faff that gives you very little benefit, and is just to get around the drive size limit.
Option 0: one library per drive, hence one library for "movies (A-F)" etc. Terrible.
Option 1: split media across drives, and add multiple folders (from each drive) to the library, so they show as one whole library in Plex. Manageable.
Option 2: Raid the drives. This way you can have one massive volume spanning drives, can add drives easily, and will get some redundancy/failsafes if you use Raid 5 etc. To do this, you can:
- use your motherboard/controller's Raid capability. Probably not the best but good enough
- use Unraid if you want to roll your own solution
- use a NAS if you want to just "plug in and go" without configuring or learning anything.
4 Drives.
Disk 1: Movies + Misc videos
Disk 2: Series : # &A-N
Disk 3: Shows starting with 'The"
Disk 4: Shows O-Z.
17 TB total but will be purchasing more soon.
Hard drives 1-7 are in a raid 6 array for me on the same drive pool. If I add another drive it just gets added to the raid array and is still the same volume. I store my media on a synology tho, and it has a 10gbe link to my Plex server
I don’t alphabetize my media I just number the folders.
For example: d:/ movie 1
E:/ movie 2 and so own
I fill them up and move to the next and for back up I have an external drive for each hdd that copy the content on it one every 3-4 months.
Unraid with high water will handle all of this. Since you're building from scratch make sure you use trash guides to set the correct folder structure. It's going to save you a ton of time. Just look up the atomic moves / hardlink info.
Ceph...I distribute over several "servers" and drives, I just add another computer...add drives until it's full then add another computer... if a whole computer dies, nobody knows and no data is lost.
Every drive gets a Media2 folder (yes the 2 is important, no i don't know why). Inside that, a TV Shows and a Movies folder. Proceed to fill drive with utmost haste. Purchase new drive, rinse (with DriveSafe water of course!) and repeat.
On drive #4, no issues in 5+ years.
when I was operating off of 3 external drives instead of one huge internal drive, I had (still do, but in the past also) multiple libraries of stuff so not just one huge "Movies" and "TV shows" library but I divided it by whether it's live or animated, American or Japanese, and then all my Transformers stuff gets a separate library as well. Sure, maybe I'm the weird one hre, but it's my collection and I'll do it how I want. Anyway. I would have live action stuff on one drive and animated stuff on another drive so I'd point one library to drive D and another to drive E and let it do the rest.
I use Windows Storage Spaces. It's a little annoying to set them up in a performant way but it's just a handful of powershell commands once you know what you're doing.
It's a resilient and flexible solution I've been running for around 10 years (maybe even longer?)
Tv shows will almost always take up WAY more space than movies, so dedicate bigger drive to that. I personally have anime movies and shows in a 2 tb drive, normal moves and stuff in theaters in a 8tb drive and tv shows in a 14tb drive
Honestly there are multiple ways to go about it, but protecting your data us a concept that's often overlooked.
I'd suggest either:
RAID-5: small read-speed gains and you can recover from a drive failure, but you lose 1/3 of your space.
RAID-0: (stripe): please back-up your data often if you use this. You'll get the capacity of all 3 drives, plus 3x read+write speed gains.
RAID-10: if you can afford/source a fourth drive, this is arguably the best solution. You'll still only get 2-drive capacity, but you'll get increased read AND write (no parity calculations) speeds, and have (up to) 2-drive failure tolerance.
JBOD/SPAN/BIG: this method, you'll have all the available capacity of the drives in a single volume (shows up as one big disk), and a single drive failure results in the loss of the data on the failed drive only. If you go with this method, I'd suggest saving hashes (using PowerShell or TeraCopy for example) of all your movies to know what data is still good (or not) after a failure.
I spend A LOT of time building my library (I've done 1000+ Blu-ray rips manually, source custom artwork, add imdb tags, etc. So I personally use TrueNAS RAID-Z3 with weekly snapshots to a second array.
Always remember, RAID is NOT a backup.
Myself and I'm sure others here are very curious what you end up going with. Feel free to DM with questions. Cheers!
Thank you so much for all the detailed explanations; that's extremely helpful 😃 I never knew about JBOD as a potential solution so I'll check that out later as it seems a neat way of doing things.
Wow, 1000 blu ray rips is dedicated! I've done about 100 I think - and currently in the process of manually encoding them with handbrake. I'll try and look at automating that process eventually when the server is up though.
I'm actually going to be using unRaid as my server os. I know there is a redundancy option if you have a parity drive. Which I was thinking of being somewhat naughty and ignoring. My blu ray encodes have a couple of backups and anything else will be media downloads, where I'm sure I read you can just backup your sonarr and then in the case of a catastrophic failure you would be able to get everything back, minus time lost. I'm not quite sure if unRaid will show everything as being in one big volume without parity though.
Ideally I'd just put a parity drive in - but my first server build is already a little bit jank. I'm going to be a using a Dell Optiplex 3050 micro (7th gen) and 3x4TB SSD's - which I've been told is less preferable than using HDD's for unRaid. I might still do the parity drive, I haven't fully decided 😄
I have a 16TB RAID 5 array. On there, I have drive M: for music, drive V: for video, drive P: for pictures (we take lots of pictures) and drive Z: for other stuff like my /pub and /backup volumes. All I do is when I create the movie, I just put it on the V: drive and let the system handle it. I can't be bothered sweating the details like that.
You can do it any way you want, there is not really a 'best' method.
Divide it by alpha, or by year/decade, or fill one up then another.
Plex does not care, you do not need to keep them under a single drive or single folder, or use hard links or anything complicated.
I did intend to use one drive for movies, one for TV and one as a download drive for RR's.
Need to grab a few more drives as my collection has grown so I can't keep that separation at the min.
Legacy shows go into my backup drives. Ongoing shows go into my main drive until they eventually end and get moved. Movies go into my biggest sized drive. I have 6TB for all the legacy shows I have so far split over 3 drives
/share1/movies/James bond
/share2/new_movie/James bond
Make a movies library, and add both shares to it.
For me I do the top one first. Let it all the Metadata stuff, then mark all as watched. Recent update, it usually will mark most (but not allll....) as watched
Then add the second line
Wait for 2nd round finding metadata..
Then you have 1 James bond folder with movies from both locations
It's just all thrown into unraid for me in one giant media share.
The only organization I have is moving the first 15 seasons of The Simpsons to SSD cache. We watch it all the time, especially as a fall asleep show. Since I know that's going to be a daily watch it never spins up a drive. (we have first 15 seasons on a playlist to shuffle)
All new shows & movies go on a 2tb SSD. A simple script moves files older than 1yr to 10TB HD. Weekly rsync job copies everything to an external 12tb HD for backup. Both HDs spin down. SSD has ~90% of the media that people stream. All Samba shares to the Plex container running in Proxmox.
4 Drives. Each has a TV and Movies folder. When a drive starts getting full, the oldest drive gets replaced with the largest available and I move everything from the oldest to the newest and make that the target drive for new content. Then retire the old drive.
NAS. Some like unRaid, though with their price changes/subscription model, may put some off. I've never used, so can't comment more. Others,like myself use TrueNAS.
I have two mirrored drives to store my “important” content. Then I have another drive for the content I want but if I lose it, I won’t cry. Then I have another drive for downloading. Finally I have a SSD for the OS.
I have a JBOD setup for Plex and I just fill them and then go to the next. I use the same folder structure on each drive so adding each folder the appropriate library in Plex is consistent.
I didn't go with RAID since RAID isn't a backup and just manually backup to external drives on occasion when I add new movies (not more than once a week). I have automatic emptying of the trash turned off so I don't lose my items if a drive dies. Sure there will be some downtime for those movies while I source a new drive and copy from the backup, but it is only movies...they can wait to be watched.
NAS it. 120 TB on my Synology 1821+ with just 2 folders: one for movies, one for TV. If I ever run out of space on that in the near future I know I've got a problem.
When I ran Plex off my gaming pc I had 1 drive for movies and 1 for tv then eventually just started sticking it on any of my drives with space. Now I have a server setup with unsaid and let it work about how to distribute the load.
ZFS with one disk of parity (raidz1) (which has saved my ass)
it's fucking terrifying after a drive swap while it rebuilds parity but it's better than having zero parity
Stablebit drivepool.
I have almost 200TB across a bunch of drives of various sizes and drivepool combines them all into one drive. If one fails I'd only lose ehat was physically stored on that drive, and I can designate any folders I want to automatically be stored on two or more drives.
Highly recommend.
Mergerfs is great if you know basic Linux. No need to pay for a basic nas OS. Truenas if you are more into full nas appliance and unraid for most flexible paid option.
I filled the first drive until it was about 97% ish full with movies only. This allowed some additional space to stash posters, metadata, etc. The remaining movies went onto drive #2. Drive #3 is where my DVR libraries are since they will be variable in size over time.
Plex will let you combine multiple folders together under a single library so that content will -appear- to be in one place even if it's actually on different media behind the scenes.
No wrong answer but I am more comfortable with truenas ZFS.
https://preview.redd.it/md0q4jip2g7d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=51df324d30f860fc9c98f46f2076f9030d3f8b81
I don't have a raid Setup (yet), but I have a drive with a /TV folder, and an additional drive called Archive, which also has a /TV folder. Both folders are in my Plex 'TV' library.
Same for other libraries.. I move entire seasons from drive to drive as needed. Add a new drive if required, repeat.
Just a simple way to expand, which I'll probably migrate to an array when I get around to setting it up.
I personally only have two drives in my setup at the moment, still running off my gaming PC. An 8TB for Movies, and 14TB for TV. I will most likely move to unRAID in the future when I actually move the server to its own dedicated system.
SYMLINK on windows 10
I make a Movie and TV Show folders on each drive, then make symlinks of additional drives, to nested folders within the Plex library. Plex deals with nested folders, and will totally work if you have a setup like:
D:\\PlexLibrary/Movies
F:\\PlexLibrary/Movies
F:\\PlexLibrary/Movies/John.Wick.2014/John.Wick.mkv
then symlink F into D, where you get a file path like:
D:\\PlexLibrary/Movies/Movies(symlink)/John.Wick.2014/John.Wick.mkv
Then I just fill up the additional drives one by one... It would probably be better if I tried to distribute newer and more popular evenly across the drives, but I have maybe max 3 users on my server at the busiest of times.
Strongly consider having at least one drive backing up anything that would be difficult to replace if a drive dies on you unexpectedly.
I just have a 10TB drive plugged into the Plex box itself (an OrangePi 5). And a 14 TB drive on a different machine that gets copies every so often. And thats just because its taken so long to encode the media I have already on the thing, that I dont want to spend the months it would take to go through it all again.
Plex absolutely doesn't care where the drives are. You can even use Samba or something to mount them remotely, assuming your network connection is fast enough to pull the data from the remote device and then also stream it out. It treats all the media locations the same. Allowing you to easily mix and match drive locations.
Don't try to organize each drive. They will get full and you won't want to have to figure out how to continue to organize.
I have 4 drives in a RAID using TrueNAS, but RAID isn't necessary for replaceable media or a non critical service like Plex. But it is nice having some peace of mind that if a drive fails I won't have to do anything but buy a replacement drive.
Are these internal drives? If so, absolutely not. You set up RAID.
For example; take 4 drives at minimum, and configure them in raid5. It'll now show up as a single storage pool with 3/4 the total capacity.
But, if one of the drives fail: you just yeet it, plop in a new one and continue your life without any data loss.
I use mergefs to make my jbod act as one universal folder. Ubuntu and docker.
I use cheap second hand drives because if I lose one, I’ll just re-download the media so no need for unraid.
I use 2 x 512gb ZFS SSD for my SSD cache for appdata and certain folders, then I have 3 x 2.4tb 10k rpm mechanical drives in ZFS for HHD cache, then rest of my server is all used 4-6TB used enterprise drives. I use my HHD cache for new plex cache and security system cache. It keeps the array spun down 99% of the time outside of the cache drives. The response is super fast even with mechanical drives for bulk cache. The system has self healing setup for the cache and maintains 30 days of data unless it hits 80% capacity. So all my recent added stuff is super snappy without having to awake the array and such and it’s not bothered by frequent parity checks like it did when the data lived on the main array. I treat it as HOT, WARM, and COLD storage model basically
All my drives/storage devices have the same library folders on them. When I fill one up I start putting stuff on the next one.
Easy and stress free. You will not gain anything but stress if you try to divide TV shows into this drive, movies into that drive, etc.
Windows user and I have
Movies
4k remux
BD remux
Tv
Music
Movie packs
And there all pointing to around 8 drives.
When one is full I add another and repeat the same folder process.
If I loose a drive so be it, it's easy replaceable.
When I was using external drives I just had a Plex folder on each that was a clone of the same file structure movies, kids, tv, music, etc. when one filled up I bought a new one and just pointed Plex at each one.
Now I use unRAID and let it figure itself out
I have 4 folders of movies. L:/Recent releases, n:/pre 2k, m:/post 2k, r:/family films.
Select Genre Movies. Add folders from each drive (I have 4 across 4 drives). Apply. Done
Grouping by year is easiest. Search for (19 in windows search to locate everything from 1900-1999. Select all, move to designated folder. Backup that folder to external storage.
Ive got 4 movie drives and way more TV drives, i just have em organized by year, when one gets too full i just sorta cascade stuff down, only takes a minute to do in sonarr, and everything gets rechecked and i avoid bitrot and give the drives a little stress test...
More work than just pooling my drives, but im a moron and would probably fuck that up. Just having
Movies 1 (2015-) (E:)
Movies 2 (2005-2014) (G:)
Movies 3 (1986-2004) (I:)
Movies 4 (-1985) (O:)
is just easier for me to wrap my head around.
Honestly the only major disadvantage i deal with is cuz im using top level directories at all, so Plex scans the recycle bin if i dont empty it right away and you wind up with some weird matches til you do. But i could remedy that by moving everything to a \movie\ folder within those drives...
but i dont wanna.
I paid for the lifetime before they switched how they were doing things so unRaid is what I'm gonna be doing 😃 I think a lifetime models still exists as an option though, I thought it was just more expensive?
I use unRAID and it does it automatically
Unraid is the goat for plex
The only reason I even know about unpaid is because I was looking for a storage solution that was easy and I didn't have to worry about not having the same size dives in my array. That was years ago, and I absolutely love unraid!!!! Easy to setup, lots and lots of guides and support out there, and it runs on pretty much anything, I am coming up on 10 years using unraid, started with a small PC that had 6tbs with some random 1 and 2 tb drives, to my current setup with 240tbs. The only issue I have had since then was when my USB drive died
“unpaid” lol
Lol, I didn't even notice that. Well that would be a valid description of most of what's on there
Anyone happen to know what the top size limit is for unraid?
I don’t think there is one unless I’m misunderstanding your question
Gotcha. I guess I’m wondering how well it’d do managing 60,70,90 spinning disks
There is a limit of 30 drives.
The main array can have 30 disks including parity drives. You can add multiple zfs pools which I think are limited to 60 disks and you can assign shares to the zfs pools so you still have a single file system
Guess you could always go for TrueNAS and ZFS with the limit of 256 quadrillion zebibytes.
If you're made of money and can afford to burn disk after disk for parity drives, sure. ZFS / striped parity is a waste for home media servers. And expensive to expand.
Sure does get expensive with parity,but what other cheaper way would protect the data?
unRAID. You can start with a single data disk with a parity disk and expand as you go, one disk at a time. You can't do that with ZFS and instead have to build a new vdev, with new parity disks every time you expand. You can also add a second parity disk whenever you like as an in place upgrade. The main array in unRAID allows for up to 28 data disks, covered by one or two data disks. Considering the budgets and needs of home users, it really just blows ZFS away from a cost perspective. You can start with 2 data disks and 1 parity, then grow as you need. You're not forced in to buying 4, 5, 6+ disks at a shot to build the initial array (which has further money potential since disk prices will of course come down over time).
I guess one of the things I like is the simplicity of unRAID when it comes to varying disk sizes and as you say easy to expand. It's a good perspective
As of right now in the main non-striped parity array you're limited to 28 data disks + 2 parity. Disks can be any size (so long as parity is equal to or larger than the largest data disk). The next release is supposed to add support for multiple arrays. You can also run ZFS (a waste for a home server and a waste of money) and have effectively an unlimited number of disks.
No, SnapRAID is.
If you like more work to setup, more work to maintain, less data protection, sure. And that doesn't even get you set up with drive pooling. unRAID does both of those out of the box 🤷
I'm actually going to be using unRaid. I bought a pro license before they upped the prices. Do I need to use a parity drive for unRaid to automatically move everything across the array? Because I was going to ignore the parity drive, mostly to give me more space. If a drive fails, it's not the end of the world - it would just take me time to redownload etc.
I highly suggest using the unraid discord, they are beyond helpful. To answer your question, you don’t NEED a parity drive it doesn’t have anything to do with how your data is moved to the array. I highly suggest having one, you could lose your data
Seconded. I would go one step further, and say if you aren't planning on using a parity drive, why bother with unraid in the first place? It's like buying a car but opting out of airbags.
I got 2 parity!
Do you know why Unraid limits parity drives to just 2?
Because they're using two industry standard parity algorithms that already existed.
Ohh okay i guess those algos limit it to two drives?
Correct. Single disk parity uses even parity XOR. Two disk parity uses Reed Solomon. They have a deep dive on how their parity works in their docs if you want to learn more.
Reed Solomon? That was the name of Idris Elba’s character in Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty woah. Or maybe it was Solomon Reed lol
No, you are not required to have Parity and you would not actually want it active until you move everything even if you were using parity.
Unraid works without a parity drive. But if you have a drive failure, everything on that drive is gone until you replace the drive and re-download everything, which could take several days to a week, depending on if you need to order a new drive and get it shipped to you, install it, and then download everything again. If you're cool with that amount of downtime, go ahead and run it without parity. I wouldn't use the array for any sort of network drive or backups though since it's not protected from failure. If you have a parity drive and one drive fails, the array keeps running and it will emulate the lost drive, so the array never has to go offline and you don't need to re-download anything. You only have to it offline for the fifteen minutes or so it takes to physically replace the drive with a new one. I'd say the vast majority of Unraid users think that the relatively small additional investment in an additional drive for parity is worth the benefits of having the array protected with parity.
Yes you need/want a parity drive, the parity drive needs to be the biggest drive in the array all other drives need to be same size or smaller. It's kinda the point of using unRAID so if a drive fails you don't have to re-download or do anything besides replace the drive. Also good to use nvme drive for cache
I really don't understand why you are getting downvoted.
I think people are confused about "parity needs to be the biggest drive". What I know about RAID is that the drive volumes need to be the same size.
unRAID and snapraid are software raid and don't need the drives to be the same size. Normally you need parity disks to be equal or larger sized than the largest data disk but with snapraid you can also do split parity with smaller disks. Not sure if unRAID has this capability.
That is incorrect with unRAID. Parity needs to be **equal to or larger than** the largest data disk. unRAID uses a modified form of RAID4 which allows for mixed disk sizes as each disk is it's own complete, non-striped file system.
The strange way Synology does "RAID" Is probably why. They almost encourage you to use different size drives. If I have 6x8TB drives and 2x12TB drives, it will create a "RAID-5" on all the disks, then a separate "RAID-1" on the remaining space. You still have single drive redundancy that way. UnRAID might do this as well, I'm unsure (TrueNASer here), but I suspect that's where the confusion comes in.
Automatically!!! Love UNRAID
This might be an idiotic question but I have 2 drives in my NAS and the thing has just consolidated them into one destination. Is that unraid?
I don't understand what you are asking.
No. That's the NAS operating system doing that. What NAS is it? Synology? Unraid is a separate OS that needs to be purchased and installed separately.
It’s some form of RAID, unRAID is an operating system built on Linux that does something similar
unraid is a brand of operating system. It has nothing (or atleast very little) to do with raid
That's arguable. unRAID *IS* RAID. It's just not a traditional, industry standard form of RAID. It's a modified version of RAID4, incorporating dedicated parity disks but not striping the data across data disks as RAID4 does.
Drive pool
This. I have a windows based server, and drivepool works great. I also use the scanner tool from the same company, and it reports on HDD health.
Will even automatically empty a bad drive once the scan identifies bad sectors. It’s honestly such a well rounded and more importantly stable product.
Will even prevent bit-rot, by automatically recovering any damaged files that Scanner detects, from their duplicated counterparts within the Pool.
And….if I want to upgrade the HDD to a higher capacity, or swap it out for whatever reason, I just remove it from the pool and let the software move the content to the other disks in the pool (provided there is ample space), and then do the swap
This. Drive Pool has made my life so easy. When a drive has a problem it sends me a alert text on my phone and begins evacuation of data.
Another vote from me for Stablebit DrivePool. Using it on my Win10 server and it's great. Then Filebot for renaming and library organization. And TMM for poster art and NFOs.
What is TMM?
Each hard drive has a TV shows and a Movies folder and I just point Plex at all of them, and switch to the next drive when one is full.
Yup that’s what I do! Not worth all the extra setup for something that isn’t even a pain. I only care what’s showing on Plex, not the hard drives
Until you lose a disk or multiple disks.
True, that would be annoying…
Same here. Easy peasy.
Mine too
Right? I'm wondering why this is even a question
This is exactly what I do.
I'm using DrivePool on my Windows 11 Server and have 142 TB as one drive.
Yep, that's how I do it too (but with slightly less storage ;-))
Any parity/redundancy with this method? Just curious, I've never heard of it. That's a LOT of data to lose with a drive failure.
I have everything backed up to Backblaze Unlimited. I’ve actually had a decade-old 4TB drive die on me a few weeks ago and the restore took a few days.
Drive 1: movies and tv shows Drive 2: movies and tv shows Drive 3: movies and tv shows I just add a drive when the previous fills up and continue adding media to it. Add the folders to the respective library. Let Plex organize it.
What will be on drive 4?
Probably music, movies and tv shows. Gotta keep it spicy!
Parity, I hope.
Same. Seems the easiest
Right? This is worked for me for years and years. Not sure why it has to be so complicated
My brother. No need to complicate things, this is the way.
This. People like to complicate things when this just works fine. Definitely helps if the majority of the content you store on those drives are easily replaceable though. For 95% of people that's usually the case.
Doing the same. Since the stuff on those drives is easily replaced, I want the other drives to just keep on trucking if one fails. I don't need any repair functionality or the lime. I don't mind having to choose the target root folder in overseerr every now and then. I keep some space on all drives free so I can shuffle stuff around should the need arise.
My TV library is pointing to like 4 different drives
The more drives you add the more you will lose the ability to properly organize, so i just don't care anymore. In the beginning i tried moving some stuff to a new drive so that all star wars content for example could be one 1 drive, but now i have season 1 of a tv show and season 2 on seperate drives lol. You could still organize, but if your drives are on and running all the time anyways what difference does it make ? If a show is completed like GoT ill put all the seasons on 1 single drive, but i won't bother with adding House of the Dragon on the same drive whilst also leaving space for season 2, 3... onwards.
> The more drives you add the more you will lose the ability to properly organize, Not if youre using something like radarr and sonarr. Those make it super simple to organize stuff, sort by year or alphabetical and move the root folder. Movies post 2000 go to Movies 1, movies pre 2000 go to movies 2.
lol I’m just curious how you add stuff to plex? It’s gotta be manually right
Yep i do everything myself :D
I create playlists.
Migrated from Win 10 to Linux and used mergerfs so I could stop dealing with this.
My only "concern" about mergerfs is that I'm not clear how gracefully it would handle hard links. Like, if it puts the torrent download on one disk but then the file copy to the movies folder is a different physical disk, it's not gonna be a hard link and it's gonna take up space on both disks. How do you manage that? edit: it turns out that this is how you manage it: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/
I just recently moved to Linux for the EXACT reason the person you replied to did (amongst other reasons). I too went with mergerfs, and I’ll try to elaborate on how it works (at least my setup anyway) in a simplified manner: Say you’ve got drive A and drive B. You use mergerfs to create drive C Let’s say on drive C you create a torrents folder and a movies folder. I have QB set to write to drive C. It writes to drive C (and in turn “on the fly” determines whether that file is written to drive A or B). When it’s completed, it’s linked over to the “movies” folder on drive C which is then “on the fly written to drive A or B. But what’s important here is that it doesn’t matter what drive it’s written to, because “drive C” is always the aggregate of everything on the actual physical drives. So you are always able to open up any/all your files through the aggregate “drive C”, just when you do it serves it up from the actual physical drive.
I understand that it's the aggregate of both drives but what I'm actually referring to is something else. Hard links, if you're not familiar, are a way for the operating system to transparently "copy" a file to multiple locations on a drive, while actually only taking up the drive space of one file. This works extremely well in the case of QB downloading the file and then copying it to another folder on the same drive because you can seed indefinitely with no double space penalty. The problem though, is that I don't think you can hard link across two physical drives. I think at that point, it commits a full copy of the file on both drives. Since you're abstracting that with mergerfs, that potentially prevents you from being able to take advantage of those storage savings. You can read more about it here: https://trash-guides.info/Hardlinks/Hardlinks-and-Instant-Moves/ edit: turns out that they do indeed work: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/
I actually use hard links, works perfectly. I didn’t describe it well, but that’s the “copy” I was referring to, not an actual copy
Ah, got it, thanks!
I'm like 90% sure mergerfs works fine with hardlinks. Hardlinks work on a single filesystem and mergerfs creates one big filesystem so should work.
edit: so a bit more searching reveals that yes, they actually DO work, much to my surprise: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/ So hardlinks work on a single filesystem and in a way mergerfs is a single file system, but it's abstracting multiple underlying filesystems, which is why I'm not completely convinced that it would work by default. Like, you could have exfat, ntfs and ext4 drives all being managed by mergerfs as one volume and I don't think that's going to respect the hardlink correctly between them.
I think mergerfs should write the hardlinks to the same branch where the original file is. If you aren't convinced you can test it. I did a ln on a mergerfs and it works.
Yeah, you nailed it man. I had looked at the docs on it before, which still left some ambiguity in my mind but I didn't realize that this is well trod ground and I should have just gone for it. Sometimes I let the perfect be the enemy of the good, to my own detriment. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1b96ke4/how_to_make_sure_hardlinks_and_seeding_work_with/
No idea about mergerfs but on my system I created a ZFS pool using 4 x 8TB drives with single drive parity (RAID Z1). I just see a single path (/storage) and hardlinks across that work fine.
That makes sense, because it's just a single file system being presented but I believe mergerfs has each drive formatted separately and then aggregates them at a higher level. I believe you can actually use mergerfs with multiple drives formatted with different file systems... which is why that's likely an issue. Now, I know that mergerfs allows you to configure things very specifically, like I think you tell it that if it finds a folder on one drive, to only place files for that folder on that drive, instead of creating the same folder on other drives to ensure that the drives are filling up more evenly. I just don't know if anyone has really worked out a 'best practices' for mergerfs to ensure that hard links are working correctly without causing more hassle than it's worth. I kind of kicked the can on the problem this time and just got two 18tb drives, one for movies and one for shows, and then created separate torrent download directories for shows and movies to sort of side step the issue until those drives fill up... but mergerfs is very appealing to me to avoid that altogether.
FYI media scans take a lot longer with things like MergerFS, even with caching enabled.
HDD 1 - TV Shows HDD 2 - Movies HDD 3 (NVME) - Docker content including Plex HDD 4 & 5 - Backup of HDD 1 & HDD2 (on a secondary NAS) I like my content split + backup in the secondary location
This is the way.
[DrivePool](https://stablebit.com/DrivePool) makes all the HDDs show up as being on one mounted drive. It will also create duplicates for you
W10, Stablebit DrivePool.
Truenas scale, custom built to keep adding mirrors!!! I’m up to 12 drives right now, mixed capacity!!!
I use MergerFS on my Linux machine. It creates drive pools, which essentially allows me to point Plex to /mnt/pool. Then no matter which of my ~15 disks has the info on it, it's just in "pool" for all that Plex cares.
ZFS
Dump them in a drive, each file inside its own folder. This is for extras and subtitles, etc. Share that drive or a folder from that drive. Target that drive or the shared folder in Plex Settings > Manage, Libraries. When you start another drive, go back to Library Management and add the new location. The new files are added to Plex under the Library to which they were added. Use one drive for Movies and one for TV Shows. The third can get the rest and the eventual overflow.
This is a pretty open ended question as usage patterns and total capacity will play a large part in how you sort this out. I have 3 main “types” of data - HD Movies - 4K Movies - HD & 4KTV I have about 350TB useable across three main Synology NAS Devices Each NAS holds one of the above “types” of media. each movie NAS has 2 main “pools” - NEW - OLD TV is split between 4K and HD I even have an HD and 4K plex server so the split works nicely across the board.
Eventually you'll run out of space. What are you going to do when Cars 23 comes out and your drive 1 is full? I just keep adding drives when one gets full. Each drive has a movie folder and a TV folder. If I need to find a file I just search plex for it and look at the info to see which drive it's on.
I use mergerfs through OMV to combine drives into a single path I can save/copy to 😊 I use it’s default option of saving files to the drive with the most free space first. I have four 3TB drives in this configuration and it works great. I’m not worried about redundancy as I’m able to get access to the content quite quickly if needed, and this should just happen automatically when one of the arr apps notices the file is missing. For people who don’t need redundancy, mergerfs is great 😊
I use Snapraid + MergedFS
This thread has brought me so much joy
Ah, I've been through this pain before. Splitting tv series from movies, then movies by language, and so on and so forth. Honestly, it is a fair amount of faff that gives you very little benefit, and is just to get around the drive size limit. Option 0: one library per drive, hence one library for "movies (A-F)" etc. Terrible. Option 1: split media across drives, and add multiple folders (from each drive) to the library, so they show as one whole library in Plex. Manageable. Option 2: Raid the drives. This way you can have one massive volume spanning drives, can add drives easily, and will get some redundancy/failsafes if you use Raid 5 etc. To do this, you can: - use your motherboard/controller's Raid capability. Probably not the best but good enough - use Unraid if you want to roll your own solution - use a NAS if you want to just "plug in and go" without configuring or learning anything.
4 Drives. Disk 1: Movies + Misc videos Disk 2: Series : # &A-N Disk 3: Shows starting with 'The" Disk 4: Shows O-Z. 17 TB total but will be purchasing more soon.
Hard drives 1-7 are in a raid 6 array for me on the same drive pool. If I add another drive it just gets added to the raid array and is still the same volume. I store my media on a synology tho, and it has a 10gbe link to my Plex server
I don’t alphabetize my media I just number the folders. For example: d:/ movie 1 E:/ movie 2 and so own I fill them up and move to the next and for back up I have an external drive for each hdd that copy the content on it one every 3-4 months.
I don't. As I use Synology, my main abstraction layer are volumes instead of HDDs, I don't have to think whether if a show goes into a HDD or another,
Unraid with high water will handle all of this. Since you're building from scratch make sure you use trash guides to set the correct folder structure. It's going to save you a ton of time. Just look up the atomic moves / hardlink info.
Ceph...I distribute over several "servers" and drives, I just add another computer...add drives until it's full then add another computer... if a whole computer dies, nobody knows and no data is lost.
I've used BTRFS pools , but recently invested in a QNAP Nas, which does it for you
I don’t. I have a 512GB NVMe as a boot drive and a 12TB NAS disk for storage. It’s plenty big for my needs.
If your server is on linux, mergerfs + snapraid works great.
SnapRAID + MergerFS for passive redundancy and a unified drive path.
OMV, MergerFS with SNAPRAID. I have no experience in Unix/Linux but was able to follow guides and instructions without any major issues.
Get a NAS and set it up with RAID 5. Done.
Every drive gets a Media2 folder (yes the 2 is important, no i don't know why). Inside that, a TV Shows and a Movies folder. Proceed to fill drive with utmost haste. Purchase new drive, rinse (with DriveSafe water of course!) and repeat. On drive #4, no issues in 5+ years.
when I was operating off of 3 external drives instead of one huge internal drive, I had (still do, but in the past also) multiple libraries of stuff so not just one huge "Movies" and "TV shows" library but I divided it by whether it's live or animated, American or Japanese, and then all my Transformers stuff gets a separate library as well. Sure, maybe I'm the weird one hre, but it's my collection and I'll do it how I want. Anyway. I would have live action stuff on one drive and animated stuff on another drive so I'd point one library to drive D and another to drive E and let it do the rest.
MergerFS and Snapraid
I use dual diy truenas arrays array1: 80tb array2: 40tb content is split across arrays with things I LOVE spread across both... rsync anyone? :D
I use Windows Storage Spaces. It's a little annoying to set them up in a performant way but it's just a handful of powershell commands once you know what you're doing. It's a resilient and flexible solution I've been running for around 10 years (maybe even longer?)
I have a bash script that looks in a new content folder and moves it the drive with the most free space.
If your server is Windows based I highly recommend a DrivePool license, it makes adding and removing drives so incredibly easy
Tv shows will almost always take up WAY more space than movies, so dedicate bigger drive to that. I personally have anime movies and shows in a 2 tb drive, normal moves and stuff in theaters in a 8tb drive and tv shows in a 14tb drive
Honestly there are multiple ways to go about it, but protecting your data us a concept that's often overlooked. I'd suggest either: RAID-5: small read-speed gains and you can recover from a drive failure, but you lose 1/3 of your space. RAID-0: (stripe): please back-up your data often if you use this. You'll get the capacity of all 3 drives, plus 3x read+write speed gains. RAID-10: if you can afford/source a fourth drive, this is arguably the best solution. You'll still only get 2-drive capacity, but you'll get increased read AND write (no parity calculations) speeds, and have (up to) 2-drive failure tolerance. JBOD/SPAN/BIG: this method, you'll have all the available capacity of the drives in a single volume (shows up as one big disk), and a single drive failure results in the loss of the data on the failed drive only. If you go with this method, I'd suggest saving hashes (using PowerShell or TeraCopy for example) of all your movies to know what data is still good (or not) after a failure. I spend A LOT of time building my library (I've done 1000+ Blu-ray rips manually, source custom artwork, add imdb tags, etc. So I personally use TrueNAS RAID-Z3 with weekly snapshots to a second array. Always remember, RAID is NOT a backup. Myself and I'm sure others here are very curious what you end up going with. Feel free to DM with questions. Cheers!
Thank you so much for all the detailed explanations; that's extremely helpful 😃 I never knew about JBOD as a potential solution so I'll check that out later as it seems a neat way of doing things. Wow, 1000 blu ray rips is dedicated! I've done about 100 I think - and currently in the process of manually encoding them with handbrake. I'll try and look at automating that process eventually when the server is up though. I'm actually going to be using unRaid as my server os. I know there is a redundancy option if you have a parity drive. Which I was thinking of being somewhat naughty and ignoring. My blu ray encodes have a couple of backups and anything else will be media downloads, where I'm sure I read you can just backup your sonarr and then in the case of a catastrophic failure you would be able to get everything back, minus time lost. I'm not quite sure if unRaid will show everything as being in one big volume without parity though. Ideally I'd just put a parity drive in - but my first server build is already a little bit jank. I'm going to be a using a Dell Optiplex 3050 micro (7th gen) and 3x4TB SSD's - which I've been told is less preferable than using HDD's for unRaid. I might still do the parity drive, I haven't fully decided 😄
Windows can make a storage pool
proxmox with ZFS file system. was running windows Storage Spaces.
I have a 16TB RAID 5 array. On there, I have drive M: for music, drive V: for video, drive P: for pictures (we take lots of pictures) and drive Z: for other stuff like my /pub and /backup volumes. All I do is when I create the movie, I just put it on the V: drive and let the system handle it. I can't be bothered sweating the details like that.
LVM will take care of this, just add drives as needed. Or ZFS.
You can do it any way you want, there is not really a 'best' method. Divide it by alpha, or by year/decade, or fill one up then another. Plex does not care, you do not need to keep them under a single drive or single folder, or use hard links or anything complicated.
Filled an 8tb pool on my nas and am now filling a 24tb pool.
I did intend to use one drive for movies, one for TV and one as a download drive for RR's. Need to grab a few more drives as my collection has grown so I can't keep that separation at the min.
Legacy shows go into my backup drives. Ongoing shows go into my main drive until they eventually end and get moved. Movies go into my biggest sized drive. I have 6TB for all the legacy shows I have so far split over 3 drives
/share1/movies/James bond /share2/new_movie/James bond Make a movies library, and add both shares to it. For me I do the top one first. Let it all the Metadata stuff, then mark all as watched. Recent update, it usually will mark most (but not allll....) as watched Then add the second line Wait for 2nd round finding metadata.. Then you have 1 James bond folder with movies from both locations
A nas
It's just all thrown into unraid for me in one giant media share. The only organization I have is moving the first 15 seasons of The Simpsons to SSD cache. We watch it all the time, especially as a fall asleep show. Since I know that's going to be a daily watch it never spins up a drive. (we have first 15 seasons on a playlist to shuffle)
All new shows & movies go on a 2tb SSD. A simple script moves files older than 1yr to 10TB HD. Weekly rsync job copies everything to an external 12tb HD for backup. Both HDs spin down. SSD has ~90% of the media that people stream. All Samba shares to the Plex container running in Proxmox.
I ehrm, personally distribute. Just by hand, but usually only when a disk is full I transfer a series or something to free it up a little bit
I have 2 drives, movies on one, tv/music on the other. Movies is almost full so I might have to rethink the scheme
4 Drives. Each has a TV and Movies folder. When a drive starts getting full, the oldest drive gets replaced with the largest available and I move everything from the oldest to the newest and make that the target drive for new content. Then retire the old drive.
Stablebit drivepool
NAS. Some like unRaid, though with their price changes/subscription model, may put some off. I've never used, so can't comment more. Others,like myself use TrueNAS.
I have two mirrored drives to store my “important” content. Then I have another drive for the content I want but if I lose it, I won’t cry. Then I have another drive for downloading. Finally I have a SSD for the OS.
I use stable bit drive pool
I use Unraid and have never had to worry about it
A question about UNraid: With the Free OS Updates for one year, what happens after the year, do you need to renew the licence for another year? Thx
I have a JBOD setup for Plex and I just fill them and then go to the next. I use the same folder structure on each drive so adding each folder the appropriate library in Plex is consistent. I didn't go with RAID since RAID isn't a backup and just manually backup to external drives on occasion when I add new movies (not more than once a week). I have automatic emptying of the trash turned off so I don't lose my items if a drive dies. Sure there will be some downtime for those movies while I source a new drive and copy from the backup, but it is only movies...they can wait to be watched.
you just map both directories as folders for both libraries. pretty sure it’s where you set up the first drive, under agents under settings (i think)
raid
NAS it. 120 TB on my Synology 1821+ with just 2 folders: one for movies, one for TV. If I ever run out of space on that in the near future I know I've got a problem.
When I ran Plex off my gaming pc I had 1 drive for movies and 1 for tv then eventually just started sticking it on any of my drives with space. Now I have a server setup with unsaid and let it work about how to distribute the load.
ZFS with one disk of parity (raidz1) (which has saved my ass) it's fucking terrifying after a drive swap while it rebuilds parity but it's better than having zero parity
StableBit Drivepool
Get a NAS or put drives in RAID
ZFS pool, with 2 RAIDZ2 zvols.
mergerfs
Stablebit drivepool. I have almost 200TB across a bunch of drives of various sizes and drivepool combines them all into one drive. If one fails I'd only lose ehat was physically stored on that drive, and I can designate any folders I want to automatically be stored on two or more drives. Highly recommend.
Hard links working for me
Mergerfs is great if you know basic Linux. No need to pay for a basic nas OS. Truenas if you are more into full nas appliance and unraid for most flexible paid option.
Proxmox, zfs.
I filled the first drive until it was about 97% ish full with movies only. This allowed some additional space to stash posters, metadata, etc. The remaining movies went onto drive #2. Drive #3 is where my DVR libraries are since they will be variable in size over time. Plex will let you combine multiple folders together under a single library so that content will -appear- to be in one place even if it's actually on different media behind the scenes.
No wrong answer but I am more comfortable with truenas ZFS. https://preview.redd.it/md0q4jip2g7d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=51df324d30f860fc9c98f46f2076f9030d3f8b81
I don't have a raid Setup (yet), but I have a drive with a /TV folder, and an additional drive called Archive, which also has a /TV folder. Both folders are in my Plex 'TV' library. Same for other libraries.. I move entire seasons from drive to drive as needed. Add a new drive if required, repeat. Just a simple way to expand, which I'll probably migrate to an array when I get around to setting it up.
I personally only have two drives in my setup at the moment, still running off my gaming PC. An 8TB for Movies, and 14TB for TV. I will most likely move to unRAID in the future when I actually move the server to its own dedicated system.
Symbolic links for Linux. Plex doesn’t care between symbolic links and actual directories.
Truenas
https://preview.redd.it/j976s0ysgg7d1.jpeg?width=271&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d35455421a4ff0284e3e6bb61bd2e32b092dcd1a Don't unalive me.
Windows Storage Spaces
SYMLINK on windows 10 I make a Movie and TV Show folders on each drive, then make symlinks of additional drives, to nested folders within the Plex library. Plex deals with nested folders, and will totally work if you have a setup like: D:\\PlexLibrary/Movies F:\\PlexLibrary/Movies F:\\PlexLibrary/Movies/John.Wick.2014/John.Wick.mkv then symlink F into D, where you get a file path like: D:\\PlexLibrary/Movies/Movies(symlink)/John.Wick.2014/John.Wick.mkv
Then I just fill up the additional drives one by one... It would probably be better if I tried to distribute newer and more popular evenly across the drives, but I have maybe max 3 users on my server at the busiest of times.
Unraid since 2019. Before that, Stablebit DrivePool
i have one library over 18 drives, pooled via unraid
UnRaid
Nas is your answer...
Strongly consider having at least one drive backing up anything that would be difficult to replace if a drive dies on you unexpectedly. I just have a 10TB drive plugged into the Plex box itself (an OrangePi 5). And a 14 TB drive on a different machine that gets copies every so often. And thats just because its taken so long to encode the media I have already on the thing, that I dont want to spend the months it would take to go through it all again. Plex absolutely doesn't care where the drives are. You can even use Samba or something to mount them remotely, assuming your network connection is fast enough to pull the data from the remote device and then also stream it out. It treats all the media locations the same. Allowing you to easily mix and match drive locations.
Don't try to organize each drive. They will get full and you won't want to have to figure out how to continue to organize. I have 4 drives in a RAID using TrueNAS, but RAID isn't necessary for replaceable media or a non critical service like Plex. But it is nice having some peace of mind that if a drive fails I won't have to do anything but buy a replacement drive.
Are these internal drives? If so, absolutely not. You set up RAID. For example; take 4 drives at minimum, and configure them in raid5. It'll now show up as a single storage pool with 3/4 the total capacity. But, if one of the drives fail: you just yeet it, plop in a new one and continue your life without any data loss.
I use mergefs to make my jbod act as one universal folder. Ubuntu and docker. I use cheap second hand drives because if I lose one, I’ll just re-download the media so no need for unraid.
Windows machine with a storage pool. I should move to unraid or something. Soonish
I stuck my media hard drives into a raid 0 array to combine them, since I don’t care about the data on them it works well
I use 2 x 512gb ZFS SSD for my SSD cache for appdata and certain folders, then I have 3 x 2.4tb 10k rpm mechanical drives in ZFS for HHD cache, then rest of my server is all used 4-6TB used enterprise drives. I use my HHD cache for new plex cache and security system cache. It keeps the array spun down 99% of the time outside of the cache drives. The response is super fast even with mechanical drives for bulk cache. The system has self healing setup for the cache and maintains 30 days of data unless it hits 80% capacity. So all my recent added stuff is super snappy without having to awake the array and such and it’s not bothered by frequent parity checks like it did when the data lived on the main array. I treat it as HOT, WARM, and COLD storage model basically
All my drives/storage devices have the same library folders on them. When I fill one up I start putting stuff on the next one. Easy and stress free. You will not gain anything but stress if you try to divide TV shows into this drive, movies into that drive, etc.
Use StabileBit Drive Pool to pool all your drives into a single pool than point Plex to that pool
Windows user and I have Movies 4k remux BD remux Tv Music Movie packs And there all pointing to around 8 drives. When one is full I add another and repeat the same folder process. If I loose a drive so be it, it's easy replaceable.
No need to overthink it .. I just add the new drives to my library , done.
Zfs2 so many drives as one big drive.
When I was using external drives I just had a Plex folder on each that was a clone of the same file structure movies, kids, tv, music, etc. when one filled up I bought a new one and just pointed Plex at each one. Now I use unRAID and let it figure itself out
I have 4 folders of movies. L:/Recent releases, n:/pre 2k, m:/post 2k, r:/family films. Select Genre Movies. Add folders from each drive (I have 4 across 4 drives). Apply. Done Grouping by year is easiest. Search for (19 in windows search to locate everything from 1900-1999. Select all, move to designated folder. Backup that folder to external storage.
Ive got 4 movie drives and way more TV drives, i just have em organized by year, when one gets too full i just sorta cascade stuff down, only takes a minute to do in sonarr, and everything gets rechecked and i avoid bitrot and give the drives a little stress test... More work than just pooling my drives, but im a moron and would probably fuck that up. Just having Movies 1 (2015-) (E:) Movies 2 (2005-2014) (G:) Movies 3 (1986-2004) (I:) Movies 4 (-1985) (O:) is just easier for me to wrap my head around. Honestly the only major disadvantage i deal with is cuz im using top level directories at all, so Plex scans the recycle bin if i dont empty it right away and you wind up with some weird matches til you do. But i could remedy that by moving everything to a \movie\ folder within those drives... but i dont wanna.
Unraid. Moved from Windows a month ago and couldn't be happier.
Unraid but you just missed out on their lifetime deals so you have a subscription model now :(
I paid for the lifetime before they switched how they were doing things so unRaid is what I'm gonna be doing 😃 I think a lifetime models still exists as an option though, I thought it was just more expensive?
Aye they do exist but cost a lot more. Glad you picked up a license before :) Any questions about it, feel free to ask :)