July 30, 20196 yr I have used a DROBO to back up my stuff the the last 8 years or so. I've had 2 of them in that time. Each was attached to my network and they have always worked. But both of them have been kinda slow and the fact that they store data in a proprietary format has always worried me a bit. 2 years ago my girlfriend moved in and brought with her a Plex server. It worried me that the content there was not backed up, but she had enough content that it was too big to copy to the DROBO. So I started looking around for a solution and ran across UnRaid. My needs were fairly simple. I didn't need VM, I don't do torrents, I just needed a Plex server that would serve one house, mostly only streaming one show at a time, and have a way to protect the media. I watched Facebook marketplace for a few weeks and spotted this for $100. HP Envy 700-406 12 gigs memory AMD A10 7700k processor Google told me it was 5 years old and had 6 SATA ports, and the processor had a built in GPU. It came with a 1 TB drive and a fresh Windows 10 install, but I didn't really care about the Windows. So I bought it and added 4 new 4TB drives and used the 1TB drive as a cache drive. I got UnRaid up and running with 3 data drives, one parity drive and one cache drive. I was able to create a few shares and install Plex through Docker. With the help of the forum I was even able to get Plex mapped to the Media share and get it to show up on my Roku. So for about $600 (including a Plus UnRaid) I was able to get my feet wet, lean new stuff, and protect several hundred hours of work invested in setting up the Plex content. Not near as cool as some of the rigs I have seen here, but does what I want it too, was cheap, and got me started. I'm sure I'll be re-building it into something cooler in a year or so. After all the Plex content gets copied over to the new server, I will be moving all the DROBO files over to the UnRaid Public share and power down the DROBO. Thanks to Itimpi for explaining how important a cache drive was. Thanks to all the knowledgeable people who contributed to the various Plex topics that I was able to search to solve issues as they cropped up.
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