Can I get my external hard drive Plex ready?

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?