For someone who wants to maintain a library of movies, I see the first two links in movies megathread total to 34TB worth of content.
What type of storage solutions do you folks use or recommend for large movie collections like this?
Do you have server racks? Which ones would you recommend?
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I think most people who have a large collection of movies have a NAS to store everything. I built mine with leftover PC parts after upgrading my main PC. Started by just throwing some extra hard drives into my old case, then incrementally upgraded it with used server parts from ebay, bigger hard drives, etc.
You’ll typically want to use something like Plex or Jellyfin to serve the movies to whatever devices you’re watching on. Then you’ll get into docker and the Radarr/Sonarr/*arr stack…
Check out perfectmediaserver.com
If you’re not comfortable with Linux and just want something configurable via a WebUI, OpenMediaVault is a good starting point.
Been sporting the 2017 version for ages. Snapraid / mergerfs and a bunch of drives
Docker compose on top of that with most of the arr’s and overseerr.
Good times.
Asustor LockerStor 10 with 12x 20TB Seagate Exos X20 (2 reserved as spare drives).
Clocked in around $6500 for everything, but totally worth it.
Holy shit that’s commitment.
Surprisingly, I’m going to make my money back quick. I was previously using older Supermicro machines and small hard drives that used a ton of power. This thing let me downsize power-wise (like a LOT), and I doubled my total capacity.
I use unraid with 5x8TB drives, 1tb ssd as a cache drive for new transfers (writing to an ssd is faster, it then moves to the array after) 500GB NVME drive for appdata and applications and a 250GB ssd for VMs and ISOs
Do you keep these in a low power, optimized environment or is this just your daily driver PC?
Its all consumer hardware but it’s a dedicated box running unraid.
- I3 12100
- 16GB DDR4 ram
- LSI raid card
- Case that allows for lots of 3.5inch drives
Most people just use a NAS (self built or one of the pre-built types) & stuff a bunch of hard drives into it. Or just stuff a bunch of hard drives into their desktop(s).
Sure there are people outfitting rack(s) of server(s) but generally that’s just the truly dedicated people going that route.
For what it’s worth hard drives nowadays go up to ~22TB so your 34TB example would only need two massive hard drives. A compact NAS or small desktop would work fine for that example.
NAS… I have a Synology with 4x18tb drives.
Does synology phone home though? Made in China, not exactly a reputable place as far as privacy goes.
(I also have a synology nas but it has 2 2TB drives and I don’t let it talk to the outside world)
If you are concerned, you could just not allow it to talk to the outside… I use pihole, and didn’t see any “talking” from it.
Well it definitely checks for updates, and it has services for finding nas for dummies that use outside communications. My router policy doesn’t allow it to talk to the outside, but certain docker containers hosted on the nas can access internet via raspberry pi proxy
Occasionally I let it update then close it off again.
Right, and all of these are optional or block-able. I guess it depends on the use case.
But, like others suggested, you could also go the custom nas way. That way it’s completely under your control.
Please explain about your pi proxy. Is it like an AP isolated from your LAN?
external 14 TB drive that’s slowly failing. I don’t much care about the content on it. I will just download stuff again if it craps out.
HP DL380 G7 with 10TB 2.5" drives & an Iomega PX4-300R NAS with 12 TB 3.5" drives. The HP runs all my 'arrs as well as does any coding work & acts as preliminary storage. Drives have cost me more than the server & NAS units.
Why did you opt for a setup with 2.5" disks? I ask because I just replaced my track server because the 2.5" are just more expensive than a server replacement plus 3.5" disks where I’m from (with 4x10tb).
I have 12tb in my server with 14tb in external drives for backups
I use an HP micro server gen 8 running truenas scale. Upgraded the memory to 16gb and upgraded the processor as well. 4bays with 14TB Seagate exos drives. Holds everything I’ll ever need for a long while.
I have a Dell server with 12 disks ranging from 12 tb to 22 tb. I’m looking to replace it with a supermicro server that can hold 36 disks instead. It runs unraid so I can upgrade dissimilar disks easily.
God damn I gotta up my game.
My server has a 16tb HDD for slow storage, 1tb SSD SATA as a web host for my intranet, also VMs 🤓
And then 9tb (2x4 TB, 1tb) NVMe m.2 SSD
Then 4tb NVMe m.2 ssd with 8tb HDD attached for my workstation
