Plex/Emby and drive speed

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jglazer63 wrote:

and was wondering if 7200 vs 5200 drive speeds make a difference for this?  I have a couple rather old 7200 drives I could use.

 

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I always recommend using either NAS-purposed drives (WD Reds or Seagate Ironwolf), or Enterprise Class.  Using old disks you have lying around does create some risk.  If you do decide to use them, I definitely recommend testing them in a Windows PC with vendor tools first (Seatools or Lifeguard).  Run both the long non-destructive test and the full destructive "write zeros"/"erase" test.

As far as performance goes, you won't see any difference for media playback or for large file transfers.  The faster RPM gives you faster seek times, so there would be some difference in folder browsing, and copying folders that contain lots of small files.  In the case of Plex, my guess is that the faster RPM would make some difference when updating the media library, but not in playback.  

That said, I use WDC Reds (5400 rpm) myself with Plex, and I find I get good performance.  I've chosen to run Plex on a Windows PC, mapping the NAS media shares to a drive letter.  The RN526x and the PC both have 10 gigabit ethernet.  But I think you'd also find that you'd get good performance with Plex running on the NAS itself.

FWIW, when you are transcoding media the performance limit will be the CPU of the NAS, not the hard drives.

I've never used Emby, so I have no advice on how it compares with Plex.