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I have around 15TB of films, so I don't think it would be practical to use external hard drives directly with the Shield?
Cheap NAS for hosting Plex content
- Thread starter pioneer2000
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I have around 15TB of films, so I don't think it would be practical to use external hard drives directly with the Shield?
Soldato
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No I don't think that would be great. Get a nas, build a nas, or host in the cloud like some people suggested.
Google drive for business.
Less than £9 a month.
Nominal 1Tb limit but it isn't enforced.
No power or backup considerations.
I definitely don't have approx 20Tb in an encrypted folder.
All the cool kids are doing it.
If I didn't arleady have a NAS this would be the route I would take, I'm slowly migrating my Movie library up to Google Gsuite drive, once done I might just sell my NAS which currently has 20TB of storage.
Use your $300 GCE credit and it’ll likely be done in less than 3 days.
Soldato
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If one has their library on Google Drive, where is Plex server running from? Guess you still need a local machine running of some kind for the server? Same for other automation tools like sab, sonarr, radarr etc.
For what it's worth I would not currently put my library in the Cloud for a couple of reasons.
1) I don't tend to change my NAS/Storage often, so whilst my hardware could die out of warranty, so far things have been OK. Fixed upfront cost then no constant monthly charges. Mind you my NAS unit was £650, and the drives I have installed also came to about the same, so I could go a lot of years on Google Drive for the same cash.
2) More importantly, whilst my download speed is alright at 150Mbps, upload is only around 30Mbps, it would take an incredibly long time for me to upload a meaningful library in size.
3) I don't need to back any of it up as none if it is irreplaceable.
4) I do quite like having the ability to watch my stuff offline, if my internet dies then at least I still have access to the library. You can cache some stuff in Plex, but then you'd have to know to do that ahead of time.
If I had better internet then it would definitely be worth considering when it reached the time to decide whether to get a new NAS or not if this one dies.
Whilst they haven't cottoned on and prevented people going over the 1TB cap, that is not 100% going to stay the same, and at some point they could start enforcing those quotas. I guess 20TB of cloud storage is usually more than £9/month.
From benefits I suppose there are some beyond the no-upfront cost thing, one is backups not needed necessarily (although even Google could lose data?), and another might be that you could share the library elsewhere without using your data or local servers to serve remote clients.
For what it's worth I would not currently put my library in the Cloud for a couple of reasons.
1) I don't tend to change my NAS/Storage often, so whilst my hardware could die out of warranty, so far things have been OK. Fixed upfront cost then no constant monthly charges. Mind you my NAS unit was £650, and the drives I have installed also came to about the same, so I could go a lot of years on Google Drive for the same cash.
2) More importantly, whilst my download speed is alright at 150Mbps, upload is only around 30Mbps, it would take an incredibly long time for me to upload a meaningful library in size.
3) I don't need to back any of it up as none if it is irreplaceable.
4) I do quite like having the ability to watch my stuff offline, if my internet dies then at least I still have access to the library. You can cache some stuff in Plex, but then you'd have to know to do that ahead of time.
If I had better internet then it would definitely be worth considering when it reached the time to decide whether to get a new NAS or not if this one dies.
Whilst they haven't cottoned on and prevented people going over the 1TB cap, that is not 100% going to stay the same, and at some point they could start enforcing those quotas. I guess 20TB of cloud storage is usually more than £9/month.
From benefits I suppose there are some beyond the no-upfront cost thing, one is backups not needed necessarily (although even Google could lose data?), and another might be that you could share the library elsewhere without using your data or local servers to serve remote clients.
Care to elucidate?
Your reasons don’t really stack up, or at least you seem to be overlooking some quite obvious stuff.
1) At the current monthly rate, £650 buys you almost 7 years of GSuite, that’s ignoring saving power costs and any replacement drive costs/down time on your NAS or the costs to expand it as/when.
2) You get $300 of free GCE credit, a VPS with gigabit or even 10Gbit connectivity is a few €/m from a wealth of different providers, im sure you can see why your local upload speed is largely irrelevant when you can easily dump 7-70TB/day for minimal cost and pay by the hour or month to do so. If you run a local Plex server as you presumably do now, it’s pretty straight forward to point it at any media source, local or otherwise.
3) Kind of a moot point, versioning and backup are better to have remotely than not.
4) How unreliable is your internet connection? In a rolling 12 months over the last 30? years I suspect I’d be unlucky if I have lost more than a a day in a bad year. Power cuts probably have a greater impact in most years, either way it’s a pretty minimal % of time (0.0027%/day).
Do you honestly believe that the biggest search engine and number one ranked site on the planet isn’t aware of how it’s products and services are used? I mean it’s been 4? years, perhaps they should google that or look at the slew of YouTube videos on the subject (a google owned business that adds thousands of hours a day of video)? Also remember the timing, it just happened to be a thing that happened around the time Amazon was offering its own service, then withdrew it.
Sign up to GSuite for Business and you get $300 credit that can be used for GCE, just like any other VPS, you can run what you like (Sonarr/Radarr/SAB etc.). If you want a more detailed breakdown, have a look at Plex Guide, it automates a lot of the process of deployment/configuration, or do it manually, whatever suits you best.
Soldato
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An interesting set of arguments there, I'll look into it some more if my NAS dies (it's out of warranty now but I am not willing it to die as it's a sunk cost).
Internet reliability here is good, actually main time I've lost it is when I moved house, took them a bit of time to sort out the new connection.
Definitely food for thought and something I had thought was possible before, but hadn't really looked into it. Will bear in mind
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I'm a little taken aback by this talk of uploading numerous TB's of MKV files to google drive! Especially considering the actual limit is supposed to be 1TB.
Do many people REALLY do this?! Also, with a lot of content being 4K / HDR / Atmos now, is it really feasible to stream these via plex over the internet?
Do many people REALLY do this?! Also, with a lot of content being 4K / HDR / Atmos now, is it really feasible to stream these via plex over the internet?
Soldato
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He's saying if you use a VPS to download stuff, then that can send the data to the cloud storage, and as those servers will have insane speeds it will send it rather fast.
That instead of uploading from your home connection.
If you are ripping your own DVD/Blurays to upload then that won't help and you'd have to use your internet for that.
Oh yes. The limit hasn't been enforced for years. Media is disposable in my eyes if they revoke the relaxation of limits and if you encrypt it at rest on Google's servers then, while I'm sure they can guess I have 10TB f movies up there, they can't prove it and have plausible deniability. And I'm an amateur in terms of abusing it!
Do you encrypt onto Google Drive, if so what do you use?
I tried creating a sync from my Synology NAS and clicked the "encrypt" dialogue but for some reason Google Drive reports "processing" vidoes which a right pain, not sure how it knows it's a video file when it's been encrypted?
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Do you get "processing" of video files, I can't understand how it can process a supposedly encrypted file?
I guess it depends on how much "risk" you want to take.
Im sure there is some legal stuff in the agreement you signed to use it, where they can either charge you obscene amounts if/when they choose to or just delete huge amounts of your data.
They may never choose to do this, but they could also do this tomorrow without notifying anyone.
Personally I will always choose to have a local server under my own control, at least then its only my fault if something gets deleted.
That's why I only think of Netflix Sky etc as secondary services because you never know when something is going to disappear (or for that matter "appear").
You pay your money and you take your choice
Im sure there is some legal stuff in the agreement you signed to use it, where they can either charge you obscene amounts if/when they choose to or just delete huge amounts of your data.
They may never choose to do this, but they could also do this tomorrow without notifying anyone.
Personally I will always choose to have a local server under my own control, at least then its only my fault if something gets deleted.
That's why I only think of Netflix Sky etc as secondary services because you never know when something is going to disappear (or for that matter "appear").
You pay your money and you take your choice