So I’m looking to create a plex server for backing up my TV/Movie collections and I was wondering which hdd would work best for my planned setup.
The plex server and hdd will just be apart of my normal everyday PC. I don’t plan on investing in a NAS or separate HTPC at this time, so I guess my question is it worth spending more money on a single WD red and expand in the future or get 2 WD blues and set them up as a raid 1?
My budget is only around $100 for this little project, so is it even worth it at this point or should I save some more money and dive deeper?
stick with whatever your budget dictates at this time.
since its in the same machine its not necessary to set up as raid unless you want to take advantage of raid functionality
raid arrays take many forms depending on what functions you want.
they each have their pros and cons
heres a wiki on the raid arrays .
for example If you are heavy into gaming and performance is essential you could choose raids 4-10 (nested arrays of striped drives) very high speed data transfer rate but its cons are power usage, heat accumulation
raid 0 has no fault tolerance and if one drive fails they all need to be reinitialized and restored because all data would have been destroyed.
raid 1 is mirroring without parity, while having a redundant copy of your system there may be some issues with errors.
raid 2, and 3 have different levels of error correction and data striping but is a rarely used setup
The purpose of WD reds and other NAS drives is that they work better in raid setups. Low power drives like greens have problems dropping out of raid arrays and reds have different firmware to prevent that. If you’re not using raid there’s no need for NAS drives.