Peripherals 5 bay hard drive enclosure/ plex server / raid ?

Hi guys,

i asked a similar question a while back, but this time it's for my friend and I'm just not sure what to recommend.

Sooooo long story short he's ripped all his DVDs, and blu rays to a few hard drives a few months back, he wants to share these files with his family (kids live with the mother, there not together, and his parents who live far away) and currently he's giving them the drives in an enclosure to be plugged into consoles or TVs, or transferring the movie to a smaller flash drive when someone in the house wants to watch something.

So I recommended plex, his machine is on the older side, still, decent tho, 3770k, 32gb ram, 1070, should be fine but his case is rather small, and he likes it that way, so he wanted an external solution without another pc.

So hes showed me this enclosure https://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-Enlc...jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==


This looks like it would be fine to house the 3 4tb drives he has, but wondering if there is gonna be some form of a bottleneck, its usb 3 so its 5gbps, and i know the drives will only be sata 6gb, but at best probs 200 read or so from them.

The question is, if he lets his family access plex, will it cause buffering issues. Also, would there be any way to raid these on an external enclosure for like a 1 drive redundancy, as its not a nas, and has not got its own os, i don't think a virtual machine would be the way to go, which is something we found on forums. Just worried if one drive dies, and he has to go back up the loft to get the movies down and rerip, its taken him a few months to rip them all again.

He has virgins m600 fiber so he gets like 50mb up and 500-600 down, so i assume if 2-4 people use it at once then it would handle fine.


(I have checked the reviews, whilst mostly positive, a lot of people mention a loud fan, and that the cooling seems subpar, which concerns me)

 

Any buffering issues will be caused by his internet or possibly the i7 struggling to transcode multiple streams in real time (if that's something that might occur for his usage anyway). SATAIII is 6000Mbps compared to his internet at 50Mbps after all. Personally, I wouldn't touch that enclosure for something like this as it offers no redundancy but then, nor does having them all on single hard drives, so he'd be no worse off.

 

Ty for the reply, from what we have seen on plex videos, the i7 should transcode pretty well due to some intel quick sync , will allow about 4-5 streams with good quality, bit lower it if more are added, he says 4 people might watch at once, but i honestly can't see that happening, and 1 will always be within the household (haven't looked into nvec encoding, i remember windows drivers used to limit these to 2 tho)

Yeah, from the price and the reviews, it would work for an external enclosure, but i would in no way say it looks bullet or future proof. He is however on a budget with most of his pennies going on drives to store the media.

I just don't know what to recommend to him tbh, i looked at the Synology stuff, way to dear, buying anything itx to build a nas, again way to dear, i would have though there would be a better solution, but all i can think of is a large case with a raid card, and doing some form of software raid to do it, which is looking like the most viable option

 

Being dyslexic this was educational for me lol

 

It's a tough one! In an ideal world it'd be a nice ITX based build but that's not a cheap solution like you say. Are the films not available on Netflic etc.?

My bad, in a rush at work and skipped a fair few number for a quick comparison

 

I've ripped all my DVDs and converted to mp4 and currently have just under 6000 movies and series episodes on a 4TB portable hard drive (with 2 x 4 TB Portable Hard Drives as backup) connected to a Celeron powered NUC and use Kodi for playback.

The ripped VOB files are copied onto 6 x 3TB Hard Drives (with 6 x 3TB Hard Drive backups). I donated 90% of the DVDs to a local charity as they took up an immense amount of space.

 

Yeah 5Gb over usb limits you to about 350Mbytes/sec max. There are no gen 2 usb 3.1 adapters yet.

 

Its more the he owns them thing, plus the large netflix package would cost him monthly pennies, and theres alot of old series he has that is not on netflix, so hes got a fair choice of tv shows and films. Hes happy ti invest in the drives for ease of access rather than the physical disks.

He has kept all his, i assume he will for years to come, hes only just parted with some Vhs tapes..... some of them he got a fair whack for tho if i remember correctly, they were rare or something.

 

are there any semi-decent enclosures for 4-5 drives that arent garbage and don't cost the same as like a Synology

 

I think trying to use the drives he already has in a multi-hdd enclosure is false economy.
One external USB drive sized to hold everything - 12TB @ ~£200, most of the way there with an enclosure with zero TB anyway.

Flog the old HDDs, or keep them for backup.

 

It's almost like you stopped reading as soon as you decided you wanted to make that point.

But if they're on DVD/BD, no need IMO unless the time to re-rip is going to cause undue strife.

Everything on one 12TB HDD isn't much different to everything spread between a few. I don't particularly subscribe to the "eggs in one basket" problem - it's either protected or it isn't.

 

yeah i had suggested a large drive to start with, can understand why he would want redundancy with it being accessed alot.


Thanks for the suggestions guys, will try to aim him in the new case route as i think its gonna be more cost effective for him

 

Few things...

- He has a backup in the stack of discs he ripped from.
- Is a bit of downtime in the event of a drive failure really a big deal? So long as he can get the data back? If no, see point above.
- If yes, bear in mind that performance during a drive rebuild (on a 3-disk array with software RAID particularly) is liable to suck. And for a long period of time, making the matter of "no downtime" largely moot if you can't stream from it anyway.
- If he really wants to use RAID on the HDDs, he's going to need to put the data that's currently on them somewhere else whilst he builds the array, so will need something like a 12TB drive to chuck the data on anyway, and we come full circle.

 

Did not think of the raid setup and emptying the drives. Good point there.

Redundancy is just something i had mentioned to him, my plan eventually was to have a separate machine set up to do, well everything, plex, data backup and storage, and more, using containers, so i really wanted a decent backup of the drives.

Not the worst thing if he needs to get them back down from the loft, just time-consuming to rerip. Ill float the option of a large drive like mentioned above as well, maybe he would be better with a larger drive in his small pc case, sell the drives hes got that way its the best of both i guess, large drive to store stuff, can be used in his current pc, and its about as likely to fail as any other drive so should last a fair while

 

If these are all production TV series (and not unique content like home video) then there are many ways to get that data back, perhaps we can skip the backup requirements just this once.

I think you're heading down the right track now. Surely best to just buy one (internal?) large disk rather than any kind of messy solution? I know you said the case was small but if there's even one disk drive then just hit ebay for a lightly used drive imo.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17NT_AaBIw0IlZFKda2ARAjnI95HbxOGw?usp=sharing

Some shots of the case and my first issue. The stock AMD spire cooler is too tall. The frame that supports the entire HD cage overlaps. As at first I was hoping to remove the fan and then mount it once the mobo tray was in place.

Option 1) Go buy another cooler
Option 2) Dig out the Wraith Stealth I have somewhere in the garage.
Option 3) (Not happing, get the dremel out...)

 

turn the cooler upside down, its centred on the mount screws so shouldn't matter, that what I did on mine, pic in this thread as I had much the same issue if I understand correctly the AMD bit jutting out, mine clashed with my DRAM.

Cooling - Disappointing custom loop | Page 2 | bit-tech.net Forums

Or do you mean the entire fan needs to sit under neath the drive cage.