May 26, 201412 yr So I've decided that for Plex I would like to mount a drive outside of my array and use SNAP to create a share and use this for my Plex library and caching transcodes. My question is a) how large does this drive need to be? b) will I see a benefit from a faster performing drive? I am going to use a 2.5" laptop drive for this as I am going to physically mount the drive in the 5.25 bay in an adapter and it's not actively cooled and will likely be spinning 24/7. (I don't like not actively cooling 3.5" drives) I have available to use a 5400rpm SATA 1.5gbs 160gb drive and a 7200rpm SATA 3gbs 320gb drive. Now clearly I know which drive is better, however the 5400 will generate even less heat and I could re-use the 320gb elsewhere. So would the 5400rpm drive suffice for my purposes?
May 26, 201412 yr I assume your movies are on your unRAID server...and the external drive is for just the PLEX 'internal' libraries... I'd say that either drive is large enough to hold the PLEX libraries for a basic unRAID server. (For comparison, I have about 700 Gig in my media share, and the entire PLEX program+databases is 5 Gig. ) And 'no' you probably won't 'see' a (practical) benefit from the faster drive... the speed constraint is most likely to be your unRAID processor, and not the hard drive's rotation speed. (Shameless plug: Consider an upgrade to a paid unRAID license, then use either of those drives as a 'cache' drive. It not only can run PLEX, but it will speed up writes as you add media to your library. )
May 26, 201412 yr Author Thanks for the input Dale, I will be upgrading to Plus shortly. Currently I've only got modest storage requirements but they are growing. Also for what I require for the server I doubt I will require a cache drive anyway. I'm pretty content with the current write speeds for what I need it for and looking at the SNAP plugin it appears to do all I need for having non-critical data outside of my array (i.e Plex database) So 700gb = approx. 5gb of database data? Sounds reasonable, in which case the 160gb drive will suffice nicely. I'm all for recycling! Do you happen to have any idea how much space Plex needs for transcoding when I'm outputting to a handheld or tablet? Or does it do this in RAM?
May 27, 201412 yr I believe it does it in RAM, although I've never really examined it closely. I seem to recall discussion about that in the PLEX forum. All my media are in MP4 format and I don't (or very rarely) transcode with PLEX.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.