Right now i have my home built amd 8350 with 32 gb ram media server running windows 7 (cant stand 8 or 10) with a ssd as my os drive then for my media i am running 4 3tb and 4 6tb drives (half is for back up which i do manually every month). My question is would a raid set up be a better choice for this (I don’t like my back up drives even powered on when I am not making my back ups to cut down on wear and tear). Or is there another option. My issue is I am having to split up my shared folders more and more because I am running out of room for media and haven’t found a way to share through windows from multi drives under one link. I have wired my whole house with cat 6 running through a switch to custom built pcs on all of my 5 tvs. Aside from my ssd the drives are wd green (the 3tb drives) and red (the 6tb drives. And as for cost the less the better .
Half of it is for back ups, I copy the drive over so in reality i am running out of space with 18tb of storage, damn blue ray quality they eat up the space.
After a decade or more on the internet I can imagine how you could need a lot of space for all the wacky po- cat videos.
Raid is going to be the easiest way to stop cutting up shared directory locations. Although you might want to look into doing a raid 0+0 (if that’s even possible) where you have your backups on one set (4 3TB) and media on another set (4 6TB drives)
Unless you’re not worried about fucking up data on your own in which case you can just raid 10 that boi and bounce like it’s 1999.
In windows 8 and 10 you are the product IMO its the facebook of OSs and besides that I hate the interface. And no cat videos lol its all movies and shows many of its very very difficult to find anymore. With as much media as i have keeping my back ups safe and reliable is paramount, hence why i do manual backups atm once a month, so I know as much as one can know, my data is safe.
Interface is only slightly different, and you can make it look like XP or 7 with some elbow grease. A lot of the telemetry is backported, if you really don’t want to be the product just use linux.
Then your best bet is probably to setup some kind of virtualization in ESXi and run two seperate instances of whatever OS you want, with two seperate raids, Raid 0 mixing 2 3Tb and 2 6TB drives. You’ll need passthrough, and HBAs for it to work right.
A bit of a side note, but do you use Handbrake to compress your blurays? It works quite well and will save a ton of disc space if you have a lot of uncompressed bluray rips.
Not too trusting of plex I dont want a program thats reaching out to the net for info on my videos ATM i hard convert everything ahead of time to mp4 with hand break using windows network sharing and vlc to play
You might want to give snapraid a look, that’s what I use for my media storage. It essentially adds redundancy to existing disks without changing the format so you can add or remove disks without having to rebuild the array.
It has built in disk pooling but I’ve never used it, on Linux I use AUFS but there are disk pooling things for Windows too that work without having to set up any kind of raid.