Can I get my external hard drive Plex ready?

DJDOC wrote:
In my excited anticipation I thought I could prepare the external hard drives with Plex before the ReadyNAS arrives.

I assume that you have three external drives filled with media files, plus at least one new empty hard drive to put into the NAS.

The NAS will initialize every drive by erasing it, so there's no point in copying any data to the new drives now. If you really feel the need to do something, though, you could test the new drives by attaching them to your PC and running a diagnostic program like Seagate's Seatools. In the unlikely event that one of the drives is faulty, you won't have to wait for the NAS to tell you.

My plan was to disassemble my Seagate external hard drive cases (2 of them) and take out the external hard drives within since they are full with about 5,000+ movies. You just explained that if I dock the two hard drives I just removed from the external hard drive shells into the NAS they will be formatted and my movies will be erased. If this is true I am so glad you have told me this because I would go berserk! This means I would have to buy two new hard drives, put them in the NAS and transfer all my media from the external hard drives to the NAS.

Am I right?

Yes you will need to purchase new hard drives if you are not willing to wipe hard drives you already have. Take a look at the Hardware Compatibility List before purchasing disks.

DJDOC wrote:

My plan was to disassemble my Seagate external hard drive cases (2 of them) and take out the external hard drives within since they are full with about 5,000+ movies. You just explained that if I dock the two hard drives I just removed from the external hard drive shells into the NAS they will be formatted and my movies will be erased. If this is true I am so glad you have told me this because I would go berserk! This means I would have to buy two new hard drives, put them in the NAS and transfer all my media from the external hard drives to the NAS. Am I right?

Yes, that is correct. If you could squeeze all your data onto one of those external drives and free up the other, you might be able to use them both in the NAS without buying another drive -- the process is a little bit like the puzzle where you have to ferry a wolf, a chicken, and a bag of corn across the river -- but that would only work if the drives were fast and reliable enough for use in the NAS, and it would leave you without a backup.

If you can afford to buy new drives, that's the best way. I happen to like the Seagate STx000VN000 (where "x" is 2, 3, or 4 -- indicating the size in terabytes), but you should follow mdgm's advice and look at the HCL for your NAS. Once you copy all your data from your current external drives to the NAS, you can then use those external drives for backup.

How much data will you be storing on the NAS?

Again, thank you for your help in this matter! To answer your question I will be storing 6TB of media in the ReadyNAS. I chose this particular ReadyNAS beacause it has 6 bays with the option for expansion for a few more bays. Right now I am doing as you suggested. I had about a TB of media in one Seagate 4TB Backup Plus which I am transferring to a WD Passport. It is transferring at a rate of about 110 MB/s and states it will be done in 2.5 hours for now. Both external HD are the same product and have USB 3.0 but also can be used with Thunderbolt technology and Firewire 800 using the proper adapters. I'm guessing that makes it a bit faster. I'm just reading the product description page. I remember in the 90's I had an WD external HD that fell on the floor damaging the shell and the areas of the power/USB plug-ins. Experimenting I took the HD out and put it in a PC tower. I don't remember if I had to format it but it did work in the end. I guess that's why I'm willing to experiment on at least one external HD now and see how it goes. I don't know the actual model number of the hard drive in the external case I have because I haven't opened it yet. As new media comes out and the hard drives fill up I will continue to purchase more HDs. The ReadyNAS product description states that the maximum capacity is 24TB with the option to expand to 44TB with optional EDA500 chassis.

I did see the Seagate STBD4000400 on the New Egg website and I saved it to my favorites! Thanks! I could not find the RN31600-100NAS Hardware Compatibility List online. If anyone can share a link to this information I'd appreciate it. I'm guessing that a list will accompany the product in the box. We'll see.

I did see the video of how to get Plex for the ReadyNAS here on www.readynas.com. I did have Plex on my HP envy m4 which has Intel(R) Core !7@2.20GHz @.20GHz, 8GB RAM, 64bit OS, x64 based processor. The TVs, computers, and XBOX 360's are connected via ethernet and I found it to still be a bit slow. I hope this ReadyNAS speeds up the Plex experience.

Thanks again for your answers to my questions. I really do appreciate it! Take care and God bless!

DJ DOC

The RAID array in your NAS can be configured a few different ways:

1. JBOD, "Just a Bunch Of Disks": Each drive is treated as an individual volume. This is like your current situation, with multiple external drives, except that all the drives are in one enclosure and they're accessible by any computer on your network. Pro: Every drive's full capacity is usable for storage. Con: No protection from drive failure (although if one fails, the others aren't affected), no automatic way to expand the size of any drive, must manually split your data into drive-sized chunks.

2. RAID0: All drives are combined into one volume. This is like JBOD except that if one drive fails, the entire array fails. The only advantage is that you don't have to manually split your data among the drives. There's also a theoretical speed advantage over JBOD, but modern drives are fast enough already that in your application RAID0 will be no faster than JBOD.

3. X-RAID2: This is Netgear's name for an automatically-reconfigurable redundant array. Pro: All your drives are combined into one volume, none of your data is lost even if one drive fails, you can expand your array at any time by adding more drives or replacing small drives with larger ones, all your data remains accessible during those expansion operations. Con: One drive's worth of storage -- the largest drive's -- is used by the system to provide all those magical features, so you can't use the full capacity of the array. For an array comprising six 4TB drives -- a 6x4TB array -- you only get 20TB of usable capacity, not 24TB (and actually, for an array that large you'd probably want DUAL redundancy -- the ability to withstand TWO simultaneous drive failures -- and that uses two drives' worth of storage so you;d really only get 16TB of usable capacity).

If your data is important to you, XRAID2 is by far the best configuration. But that means that if you have 6TB of data and want to buy only 4TB drives, you'll need to buy 3 drives to get 8TB capacity. Of course, you could buy smaller drives (and more of them) to get the same capacity for marginally lower cost, but you'll probably replace them with larger drives eventually as your storage needs increase, so its more cost-effective in the long run to start with large drives.

I looked at the price of that STBD4000400 drive you mentioned. If I were in your shoes, I'd spend a few extra dollars for the ST4000VN000; it's specifically rated for 24/7 use in a NAS while the STBD40004000 is sold as a desktop drive. Plus, the ST4000VN000 has a longer warranty.

Three 4TB drives will cost around $500, which I know is an expense that you weren't expecting... But you'll still have your external drives, so you're not only getting more convenient, faster access to your extensive movie collection, you're also getting a long-overdue backup for it.