quote:

Originally posted by snidera:

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
The sweet spot for drives seems to be 14TB right now. You can get a 14TB WD Easystore from BestBuy on sale for $208. They seem to go on sale every other month. You shuck the drive and you have an unlabeled Ultrastar.

ehh, I'm always leery about doing that - you never know what drive you'll get. You might get an ultrastar or you might get a SMR Red or Green depending on the size you buy.
SMR is really bad for RAID. I got burned when WD changed /some/ Red's to SMR & created the Red Pro/Plus. I was using 4TB then & it is SLOW. swapped it for a 6TB Red Pro after about 6 months. It's still in use, it's just really damn slow when you have to write a large amount of data. When I populated the backup server, I just wrote it to 90% full with data that doesn't change too much. It lives it's life spun down most of the time & when it's active, it's usually for read or parity check.

BB shows 255 for the 14TB USB HDD, Amazon has the WD Red Pro 14TB for 260 5yr warranty vs 2.
I do agree that it looks like 14TB is the sweet spot for $/TB.

Agreed, SMR drives suck for RAID. When I built my first NAS, I was also using Reds. Fortunately, I had ordered them just before the switch to SMR, so they were effectively Red Plus drives. For 8TB and above, WD uses Ultrastar drives in those external enclosures, so I don't see how you would get a Red, Green, or Blue. I don't think WD has used anything but NAS/Enterprise drives in the Easystore product for years, at least at the >=8TB level. Lately I've been using Seagate EXOS x14 & x16 drives, and I've gotten all of them below $250 for 14TB drives from Newegg. It's strange. Sometimes a 14TB drive will cost less than a 12TB drive in the identical brand. I expect with the largest capacities getting above 20TB now, perhaps the 14TB plateau will bump up a bit. Hopefully.

One side note from earlier. There is no one parity drive. Parity is striped across the whole array. If you have three disks in RAID 5, for example, the first write may write data to disk 1 & 2, parity to 3. The next write will be data to disk 2 & 3, parity on 1. The third write will be data to 3 & 1, parity to 2. And so on. This will make your storage size the sum of all drives minus one. A benefit often overlooked with a parity RAID array is the ability of the array to correct bit errors when using btrfs filesystems. A btrfs filesystem on a RAID 5,6 or 10 can greatly mitigate losses from bitrot.

Man this thread makes my head hurt. And I'm fairly tech savvy. If I were to build a dedicated PC for Plex, how much would I really need? I read that an Intel i7 is required for transcoding 4k, but then I also read that transcoding is only if you plan on watching remotely on mobile devices.

I only plan on using it locally on TVs, likely through Chromecast.

quote:

Originally posted by ryan81986:
Man this thread makes my head hurt. And I'm fairly tech savvy. If I were to build a dedicated PC for Plex, how much would I really need? I read that an Intel i7 is required for transcoding 4k, but then I also read that transcoding is only if you plan on watching remotely on mobile devices.

I only plan on using it locally on TVs, likely through Chromecast.

I use an Intel NUC i5 with 16GB RAM. I stream everything locally to TV's using either native apps or Roku devices and I don't transcode. I have almost no 4k content but lot's of 1080P that's compressed. Everything looks just fine on all the screens big (77") and small.