Plex data storage.

GDL · 22 Apr 2018 at 11:13

Hi all.

Currently, Plex is hosted on a VM with network shared libraries from the VM host and the media is on SAS connected disk shelves.
This is causing a little friction in my house since it's loud and expensive to run (£6 per day) and maintain.

I'm thinking of dropping down to a NUC or SFF device as no transcoding is being done with mass USB drives so...

Is anyone using Plex with the media on USB drives? Any pitfalls, issues, KB's I should be aware of?
Any recommendation for powered USB hubs?

Cheers.

ecksmen · 22 Apr 2018 at 11:43

I built a ubuntu box, the disks are internal but are use to power down after 15 minutes - most of the time they sit there powered down. I combine the disks into a single addressable pool using MHDDFs but this gives no protection over a single failed disk, but files are only written to a single drive. A lost disk just means I've lost the contents of that drive. To mitigate the impact of a single drive failure, I have SNAPRAID to provide single disk fault tolerance. It takes a snapshot once a week where all the disks spin up and the parity is calculated, given it would take me a few days to buy a new disk and pop it back in I'm not worried about loosing 1 / 2 weeks of changes not captured in the snapshot.

This wouldn't work as well for a rapidly changing filesystem, you can snapshot as often as you like. Once a week is fine for me. It means most of the time the drives are spun down, with the CPU idling in low power states.

memyselfandi · 22 Apr 2018 at 14:36

My Dad has Plex with media stored on USB disks ... it works most of the time as long as the drives are set to always use the same drive letters but issues can occur if the drives are not available and the Plex server runs an automatic scan in the background. Losing external subtitle files tends to be quite a common occurrence.

Personally my Plex server runs on an Ubuntu VM which mounts appropriate shares off of my NAS boxes (1x 2 disk and 2x 4 disk). They run pretty quiet and don't seem to use anywhere near that amount of power.

andy_mk3 · 22 Apr 2018 at 17:51

What on earth are you running that pulls power yo cost £6 a day? My rackmount dell with dual 6 core xeons, and a ton of storage costs about 55p a day to run!

bremen1874 · 22 Apr 2018 at 17:58

Isn't that a load of about 2KW?

GDL · 22 Apr 2018 at 18:15

I think it's around that much per day, I may be off some but if you factor in Backup Exec's cost in licenses and how much I've spent on it while it's in use it works out close to that. I do need to add my power draw meter thingy on it at some point to see how much it is.

Currently I'm running
G7 HP DL380 2X X5650 Xeon's and 128GB Ram.
HP MSL 2024 with 2x LTO4 drives Autoloader.
MSA 60 with 12 disks (3,4,6 TB mixed.)
MSA 50 with 25 disks. (2TB.)

It doesn't just do plex, but a lot of the services I could offload to other devices, DHCP to my Nighthawk, Pihole to my RasPi just to name two.

I guess I'm just bored of maintaining it now and just want to scale back some + we're thinking of trying for a baby GDL this year.

Plex is just the largest impact since most of the disks are just it's content, the VM's are on SSD's on the DL380.

memyselfandi said:
My Dad has Plex with media stored on USB disks ... it works most of the time as long as the drives are set to always use the same drive letters but issues can occur if the drives are not available and the Plex server runs an automatic scan in the background. Losing external subtitle files tends to be quite a common occurrence.

Yeah, I could see drive letters being an issue, I might just drop down to my 2x 6TB disks and keep the other on LTO Tape, I never watch it all at once

No need for it to be active all the time.

andy_mk3 · 22 Apr 2018 at 20:39

It sounds like that could be massively down scaled for that kind of use. A small, low power server could do all of that at a fraction of the cost and will need little to no work to keep it going. I have a Dell R210 ii and an R710, both I rarely ever touch.

GDL · 22 Apr 2018 at 21:49

I think it needs to for my own sanity being honest.
As long as Plex can run off USB drives for the media, I have a plan to move everything to smaller, quieter and more manageable hardware.

Cheers for the advice all.

BigT · 23 Apr 2018 at 15:09

I have had two JBOD enclosures with disks in for Plex storage. Both had issues with disks apparently disconnecting for no reason - this was with Plex server on Windows OS and a Plex docker on Unraid. The most recent of those two purchases, which I still use for Plex via Unraid, had an eSata as well as USB connection and I've had no such problems any more. I've no idea if it was the USB controller, the enclosures or a combination of Plex/OS and the enclosures but all I can say is that running it via eSata fixed everything. Drives spin up and down as required and so it is all very quiet and uses minimal power.

pepp77 · 23 Apr 2018 at 15:22

My Plex server is a windows 10 i3-4150 in a little ITX case. OS is on an SSD then there are a couple of other 3TB drives in the case used for general storage. I then have 2 x 5 bay e-sata DAS's with 3TB and 6TB HDDs in and then I have a HP N40L running XPenology with a 5TB raided drive in it that I have just started adding UHD films to for testing purposes. This all sits in my loft and I have the clients on the Living room and bedroom TV as well as my iPad. Even on a really bad day the electric to run it all cant be more than about 50p. I used to have HDDs externally in USB enclosures that worked without issue as the drives would always pickup the same letter, but the new way is just more permanent.

GodAtum · 30 Apr 2018 at 19:53

Are you selling your MSAs?

I use Google Drive for Business, have 10TB. Plex is hosting on a dedicated server in the cloud. Also have a local Plex server running on my ESXI box.

Avalon · 1 May 2018 at 17:32

If you want simple, GSuite Business @ £10ish a month, Hetzner Cloud or other suitable VPS at £5ish per month. Unlimited storage, no power/heat issues and way better connectivity than you will have at home.

Have a look at PlexGuide - it makes the whole process almost idiot proof.

GDL · 3 May 2018 at 12:29

@Avalon I'd never even considered cloud based, I'll look at that this weekend.
@GodAtum I will be once they are gone yes.

GodAtum · 3 May 2018 at 15:45

GDL said:
@Avalon I'd never even considered cloud based, I'll look at that this weekend.
@GodAtum I will be once they are gone yes.

Nice, I am in the market for one this year, or a Dell MD1200.

GDL · 3 May 2018 at 19:56

@Avalon Just started the 22TB upload to my new GSuit account.

@GodAtum I'll ping you a message when it's uploaded if you want. I don't have enough posts for the MM however..

Avalon · 6 May 2018 at 11:20

@GDL Did you have a look at PlexGuide? I used to run a manual system via dockers on unraid, but this allows me to have the same end result for a fraction of the cost of local storage.

GDL · 7 May 2018 at 07:16

I did but didn't see the need to use it.

According to its site.
"PlexGuide is an all-in-one media solution that deploys a Media Server through the use of your Local HD or Google Drive; serving as an unlimited back-end storage. PlexGuide utilizes Ansible and Docker to streamline your Media Server, while deploying multiple tools for your Server Operations."

Plex is easy to install and setup and drag and drop upload to GSuit is fine for the storage.

Avalon · 7 May 2018 at 13:15

GDL said:
I did but didn't see the need to use it.

According to its site.
"PlexGuide is an all-in-one media solution that deploys a Media Server through the use of your Local HD or Google Drive; serving as an unlimited back-end storage. PlexGuide utilizes Ansible and Docker to streamline your Media Server, while deploying multiple tools for your Server Operations."

Plex is easy to install and setup and drag and drop upload to GSuit is fine for the storage.

If you're happy as you are then cool, but post config, if you have to do more than type in what you want and hit add, and you get the best quality content with ongoing quality checking delivered via news/torrents and fully processed with a choice of output formats and integrated monitoring/server management, then you're probably wasting your time.

GDL · 7 May 2018 at 19:59

Been that way since early 2015 bud.
As a side note, if PlexGuide does all that, they might want to update their site to let new people know. Since none of that is listed as a feature of it.

Avalon · 8 May 2018 at 14:53

Disclosure: I have a - very - minor role in the project.

Interesting point, it used to be along the lines of ‘Deploy a Plex Server with unlimited storage utilizing Ubuntu’ which my 9 y/o daughter could discern the core function from and lead to an interesting debate on the concept of ‘unlimited’. While it obviously does much more, my view point was that should be ample to get the point across to a potential user so they could decide if it was worth further investigation or not. That lead to what you quoted and a 15 min video on the subject. This thread kind of proves I was wrong.

In simple terms it’s a free open source docker based modular installer that’s designed to automatically acquire, process, monitor and upgrade whatever media you tell it to get and provide it in your chosen output format (should you need to change it) while avoiding Google’s API/bandwidth limits and providing the tools to manage said server easily. Can you accomplish the same manually? Of course, can you accomplish manually what it does in the same time? Probably not.