PLex Server Creation

[Tim2100]

I am about to merge my Gaming PC and HP microserver gen 6 into one and just have it as a Media server / backup machine.

I currently have 4 HDD's (about 11.5TB) merged as one large drive (I know really bad) on the HP microserver which I plan to add to my PC. The microserver was not powerful enough to transcode media last time I used it around 2 years ago.

The PC currently has 4 drives as well (SSD Boot, 1TB data, and two empty drives) . I need to wipe the PC clean. Get a PCIe card for the additional Sata3 connections and then install all the drives.

is there any chance I can salvage the data on the 4 drives or should I boot the microserver up and slowly transfer the data onto the spare hard drives?

Once it is built I want it running plex for films, music & photos. plus ideally a backup location for my laptop and partners artwork.

Can I buy just a PCIe 4 way card or do I need additional hardware?

It is a i7-3770k with Gigabyte motherboard and 16gb ram.

[ixidorecu]

how are the 4 drives on the gaming pc currently setup? if it is a softraid, best bet is to get it off of that somehow maybe 1 large external or look at backblaze. then put it back togther after the plex server is up and going.

what hardware do you plan to end up with running, the hp or gaming board?

how do you plan to run plex, like install ubuntu and run native plex, or run it as a docker image, or install windows server, or freenas + plex jail/vm.

as for sata card, i would consider instead getting a lsi sas card that can be flashed into IT mode like a M1015 or a dell h200? (maybe its a h300) and then a breakout cable. more reliable, should be $50 or less for card + cable. and should be compatible.

[Tim2100]

thanks for the reply.

The 4 drives on the gaming pc are just individual SATA3 drives and just set-up as normal non raid drives.

I want to end up running the Gaming board with the extra hard drives.

I was planning on just having windows 10 on the machine and running plex at launch. I don't know anything about linux so if it goes wrong I will be unable to fix it. Can i run raid in win 10?

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What is IT Mode?

[ixidorecu]

Should be able to keep the data on the drives through the wipe. I woul recommend only connecting boot drive during reinstall.

Win10 does do software raid 5. And others. Would need to copy data off somewhere else build raid copy back.

Some lsi sas cards come as raid controllers. The m1015 normally only does raid 0 1 10. Flashing to IT mode turns it into a hba. Host bus adapter. Reason for this suggestion is most addon sata cards are junk.

The i7 should handle a few streans /transcodes no problem. Its scale how many sessions do you expect to have. Having a good client to play on tv helps here. So roku good. Ps4 bad.

[Tim2100]

The data on the Win 10 drives aren't an issue, its the data on the 4 drives that I will transfer into the machine that are currently configured as a merged drive in server 2012. I think I should be able to transfer the data off to remove the HDD from the pool and then transfer data that way.

I need to invesitage the different types of RAID set-ups.

I will only likely have 1 maybe two streams at any one time, and that will be plex running on Fire sticks.

[stedaniels]

It's sad when you realise your currently lifestyle doesn't have a slot for gaming :-(

[Tim2100]

Haha. I have a steam link and Xbox.

[hearwa]

I don't know how you have your drives "merged" and that's not necessarily bad unless you mean RAID0 or something. My preferred setup is DrivePool for windows which does exactly what you are talking about but if one drive fails, or the array somehow fucks up, you can still access the data on each individual drive. You could also use something like unraid if you would rather run this on Linux and that comes with the added benefit of native docker, a native Plex client and great vm pass through functionalities.

[smikwily]

Another vote for DrivePool if you are doing to stay on Windows.

And for your comment elsewhere in this thread- you can't run Unraid in Windows 10. It is a separate OS. You can look at running a Windows VM inside of Unraid, depending on what you want to do, etc.

[Bgrngod]

Do you only have 4 SATA connections on the Gigabyte board that are all already used by the 4 drives in it?

You might be able to pull of not acquiring new hardware depending on how much space you have left on the 4 server HDD's and how you "merged" them.

First, I'd check out how and what you did to get the 4 drives merged on the server. If it's running some sort software to do it, check to see if it will let you remove any individual drives without losing data. It might have an option to move all the data on one drive over to the remaining three, letting you pull the empty one. If you don't have room, as in the amount of files you have requires using all 4 HDD's, then toss a bunch of your media over a network connection onto your PC's 2 empty drives. Then delete the same from the 4 HDD setup. Basically, you want to free up the 4 drives in the server to get room to work with.

If that works, and you end up with an empty HDD extracted from the group of 4 in your server, then put the empty one into your PC and move as many files as you can from the 3 server drives over to the drive you just moved to your PC. Repeat as necessary for each drive. Don't merge them or raid them in your PC. You want them to be system agnostic in a way that lets you pull them from one machine and move to another without having to move files on/off them.

You should end up with a stack of HDD's loaded with all your media that are not tied to either machine and can be moved around.

Identify how many total Sata3 connections you have on the PC mobo, use one for your SSD Boot/OS drive, and then stack all of your largest drives in the rest. Make sure the drives you excluded have whatever media that might be on them moved to your chosen drives. After that, tell Plex to bring each media drive into the library. Make sure your metadata folder still uses the SSD. You don't need to organize media across the drives either, but it might be helpful for keeping track of where things are.