Plex Storage upgrade

[Jony27]

Hi all,

Looking for some advice on the above. My current Plex server is using a 1TB WD Green and a 500GB external hard drive and quickly running out of space. I'm looking to replace the drives with bigger capacity and wondering which would be the best option.

- buying NAS specific drive(WD Red/Seagate IronWolf)
or
- buying a desktop external drive and gutting it

The latter will obviously work out cheaper but has some disadvantages such as warranty and possible reliability.

 

[Squid Vicious]

- buying a desktop external drive and gutting it

The latter will obviously work out cheaper but has some disadvantages such as warranty and possible reliability.

Lots of good information on the drives you'll find and the shucking process can be found here https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

The WD My Book 8TB+ tend to be white label versions WD Reds or HGST (data centre quality HDD company owned by WD).
Warranty will be at risk with the My Books given the shucking on the newer models can result in broken tabs if not careful.
Unknown how they handle RMA of a bare drive in the UK but doesn't appear to any issues with this in the states.
Also note that these drives may need a simple fix to prevent 3.3V on one of the pins from disabling the drive... again plenty of info on data hoarder on this.

I opted for a 20TB WD My Book Duo which contains vanilla WD Reds that can easily be removed as the enclosure is designed to allow this, also comes with the full 3 year warranty - that was about £450 a month ago so still offered a substantial saving over just the disks.