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Forum Discussion
Can I get my external hard drive Plex ready?
I was tired of having 3 external hard drives with movies connected to my laptop to have a nice entertainment center. My brother-in-law told me about ReadyNAS and I bought a Netgear ReadyNAS 300 Series...
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.
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.
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