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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Asustor LockerStor 10 with 12x 20TB Seagate Exos X20 (2 reserved as spare drives).
Clocked in around $6500 for everything, but totally worth it.
Damn! My kids aren’t even worth that much on the black market.
Sell them for parts, they will worth more.
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 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.
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
How can I set up an SSD to act as a cache if I’m already using jellyfin? Or is there no easy way to go about doing that
Ita easy to do in unraid, you set it up per share, so say you have a “media” share you can change the settings to include a cache drive and then set it to write to the cache drive first and then more to array. If you don’t have a cache drive or want to add a other you can do that by installing the ssd, booting up, stopping the array and adding in a new cache drive (you can add it to your existing cache pool to increase its size or create a new one and keep them separate for separate uses)
Interesting, the multiple caches for multiple users is AWESOME actually, I’m definitely gonna be experimenting with that!
Check out Spaceinvader One on YT, he alone is all you need when it comes to everything and anything unraid.
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.
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.
I run a supermicro chassis with 6 3TB drives in a RAID6 using a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Old school for these days but works for my needs for now. Drives were free from a buddy of mine so until they start dying or I need more space, they’ll do. Then I have two 120GB intel enterprise SSDs for running Proxmox. VMs and LXCs are all on the spinning disks which surprisingly perform well enough.
I have DIY All in One server made of desktop components. 250GB SSD for OS and container volumes, 500GB SSD for nextcloud and 12TB HDD (toshiba refurbished from Amazon) for media. At some point Ill make a raid, but for now sticking with the cheapest option with no issues (or just lucky). I backup nextcloud and docker volumes to HDD and to backblaze daily, but I dont need backup or redundancy for media (read: I dont see myself spending a lot of money for files that can be redownloaded anytime)
Have a Synology DS218+ with 2x 14TB in raid 1. So just 14TB total capacity one drive redundancy. I have over 500 movies a bunch of series and it’s like… 4tb full or something?
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’re concerned about privacy, you could build your own NAS. It’s more work, but also more powerful for the money. Wolfgang’s Channel on YouTube has quite a few videos about low power diy home server.
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.
Please explain about your pi proxy. Is it like an AP isolated from your LAN?
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.
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 DS918+ with 4x18TB in RAID 5 (47TB usable storage) and a DS923+ with 4x8TB (21TB usable)
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
I have 12tb in my server with 14tb in external drives for backups
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 a Synology NAS with 4x 12 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro drives (one drive as redundancy), as well as 2x 500 GB WD Red SN700 SSD caches. I also upgraded the RAM from 4 to 12 GB, so it can run more services in parallel without chocking. The total cost was about 1500€ for a little less than 36 TB usable disk space and imo very nice performance.
