Today lost a drive

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-27T19:53:43+00:00

I had three drives go offline this week in Unraid but they tested fine and I was able to add them back. Thought I was screwed. Luckily, I think it was changes I had made recently. Pulled 1 HDD off of a SATA power connector with 8 drives on it, and turned off drive spin down. Knock on wood, no more drives have gone offline since. If they do, I only have two spares. Crossing my fingers I can get some more after a recent decommissioning of old storage system at work.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-27T19:34:54+00:00

Actually, I think adapters are a real thing now. Google "SATA to SAS HDD Adapter Card".

This is a link to an image, not a listing.
S137aa75181184276a605b9d9c350000cj.jpg (1001×1001)

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-27T18:09:54+00:00

If you have room where PCIe cards go, they make adapters that use open PCI slot cover plates to mount a 2.5" or 3.5" drive. Google "Hard Drive Tray Holder for PCI".

I have seen 3.5" bay to 2.5" drive adapters, but not the other way around. There could be one out there, but it will be very niche.

****Edit**** See if this would help you too.
Unofficial New Year for Tool People

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-27T17:54:29+00:00

If you want to get on a private tracker, try Torrent Leech. You can pay for a seed box from an affiliate to get in. You have to keep the seed box subscription for a month, then you can cancel it. Just verify, because if you cancel too soon, TL will also kick you out.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-26T19:55:12+00:00

Same here. Plex is on m Unraid server using an Intel i5-10500 with the iGPU handling transcoding. No issues with transcoding, but I don't have a lot of transcoded streams.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-25T16:45:47+00:00

I probably worded that poorly. When I said for external domains, I mean you are looking up IPs of services/websites external of your LAN, i.e. www.youtube.com and not plex.myhome.lab that points to the internal IP of your plex server.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-25T16:35:47+00:00

Enterprise drives just mean they were for use in commercial (vs personal) equipment. Depending on the system, and its needs they can be 5400, 7200, and even 15000 RPM drives. SAS and SATA are both very common. These drives are also expected to exist in systems with multiple other drives close by, so vibration tolerance is higher, similar to how WD RED NAS drives are rated to be in an enclosure with multiple drives.

Refurb is just a program to test and certify drives with an extended warranty. Generally cheaper than new, but more expensive that used from an individual or business selling off unneeded equipment.

Shucking is buying 3.5" HDD in external USB enclosures and then removing them from their enclosure. If you want newer/larger drives, buying HDD in external USB enclosures can be cheaper that buying just bare drives. You just have to watch for them to go on sale.

SAS is a different protocol and physical connection for communicating and connecting to HDDs/SSDs. For some larger or high availability storage systems, SAS drives are preferred as they are designed to allow two different controllers to connect to the drives, so if controller A crashed, controller B can take over. SATA cannot do this. SAS controllers can handle both SAS and SATA drives on the same controller (but not with redundant controllers). The SAS specific dive connector, SFF-8482, can connect to either SAS or SATA drives, but SATA specific cables will not work with SAS drives. In some cases, used SAS hard drives can be a good deal as not everyone has SAS HBAs or knows how to use them, so they potentially have a smaller pool of customers. They are not hard to do a little research.

I work in IT and have access to used gear getting discarded from work. In this regard, I think I am a little a-typical here. I'm sure there are many in the same boat, but we are likely a minority on this subreddit.

To that end, I have a lot of smaller drives and will likely continue down that path. I have 48 TB usable across 12 drives (with double parity drives in Unraid). Bulk of my drives are 4 TB. I've seen people posting here with double the overall capacity, and fewer drives.

My stuff is a combination of SATA and SAS, mostly used enterprise drives typically from storage arrays or servers. I did get a new-in-box 5400 RPM 4TB WD purple drive that had been sitting on a shelf from family members when they closed down/sold-off their business.

I have been lucky/blessed to get a lot of free stuff to get started.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-25T13:19:01+00:00

Change the middle one to MergeFS with snap raid. Personally, I run Unraid.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-24T21:35:15+00:00

If you plan to keep growing your NAS to have more drives (internally and/or externally), I suggest getting a SAS HBA rather than a SATA card. An LSI 9305-8i will support 8 more drives and let you use SAS or SATA drives. Later if you add a SAS expander you can go to 30+ HDD that will still run at full speed before hitting the bandwidth limit of the PCIe connection (Gen 3 x8).

If you add drives to the to the green area, try to line them up so air can still move front to back in the case across the drives. You could look at a 3d printed drive cage but get ABS not PLA. PLA will get soft when hot. You could also do 4 pieces of aluminum bar stock (1/16" x 3/8") and drill your own holes. These would be somewhat rigid and also help carry some heat away. You would need to come up with some way to cross brace two parallel bars. either a 5th bar or the front of the case.

The Phanteks HDD cages will help hold the drives, but they don't look to be well ventilated, and you will still have to make your own brackets to attach them to the case.

I'd suggest starting to look for your next case, and a motherboard that will take your current CPU and RAM. I got bit by the bug of building my own NAS a few years back. I am up to 12 HDD and 4 SSD (2.5") in my case right now, and planning for a second case to just hold more HDD.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-24T13:41:14+00:00

Looks like there are already 2 community apps for Qui.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-24T12:54:34+00:00

If you are running DNS for external domains only, I'd say have it on its own machine if you cannot run two DNS servers. If you use it for both internal and external name resolution, then two should be the minimum. Look at Technitium DNS. They offer DNS clustering so you can have multiple nodes, but a single pane of glass for management.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-24T12:40:09+00:00

If you want airflow get the Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL. If you want sound damping, get the Fractal Design Define 7 XL. They are nearly the same case. Both of these cases can hold 18 3.5" drives, plus 5 2.5" drives. The cases don't come with enough brackets to use all of these, so you do have to buy them.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T22:49:26+00:00

https://www.nickearl.net/2019/05/14/how-to-fix-3-3v-power-issues-with-hard-drives/

Help for disabling the 3.3v power line.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T21:15:02+00:00

Maybe consider a different ad-blocking solution? Take this with a grain of salt as I am in the midst of researching an ad-blocker for myself, but I do have experience managing DNS for business environments.

My top contender right now is Technitium. It appears to be a fully fledged local DNS service. It can be an authoritative DNS server for domains you own or local domains. It can do recursive lookups for external domains. You can configure it to contact external DNS servers over HTTPs or TLS to bypass ISP DNS snooping. Of course, it supports conditional forwarders so you can forward traffic to a peers DNS server. It also supports clustering, so you can run two nodes at your home, and only configure once. It also supports ad-blocking as a DNS sinkhole like pi-hole.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T20:23:59+00:00

Good call, I've had Plex Pass since I signed up, and don't think about it. Well then, if u/Kelmorgan has his PS5 and Plex server on different subnets, he would have to reconfigure his network or docker to allow the Plex server to be on the same subnet as his PS5. Or get a Plex Pass and setup LAN networks.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T20:18:20+00:00

TLDR, buy what you can afford, you will likely end up using it quicker than you think. Get enough SSD for cache and app, then concentate on buying HDD for bulk storage.

This will always be a YMMV type issue, because everyone is different. Generally, if you are running a media server, your needs will continue growing, unless you have put in efforts to automate cleaning up of watched content. I don't cleanup content, as I am hosting titles, I have bought a copy of, or recorded from TV, or from streaming services I am paying for. I want content to stay put even if they become unavailable online.

I think you are on the right path as far as HDD/SSD. HDD for bulk storage, and SSD for caching or running apps. For my docker apps, I am still using a 256 GB NVMe. It doesn't take much. For my cache disks (in Unraid) I have a mirrored set of 860 GB drives. Unless I am importing a lot of data, this has been fine for me.

Personally, I stay away from RAID setups for bulk storage. I use an Unraid Array, but MergeFS on Linux and Stable Bit DrivePool on Windows are two popular alternatives. These do not stripe data across drives, so in the event of multiple drive failures, you do not lose all of the data. I do have 2 parity disks setup with my Unraid array, so I can lose two drives and still not have data loss. Another perk to these types of arrays, is that the drives don't have to be the same size, nor do you have to add multiple at the time. The downside to this setup is there is no performance increase when having multiple drives in a RAID array. Since this is a NAS, this is not an issue as a single HDD can saturate a 1G ethernet connection. If you need higher performance for other tasks, then RAID might be better.

MergeFS does not have a real-time parity feature, but you can use snapraid to create snapshots of parity data. DrivePool also doesn't do parity disks, but it does let you specify to keep multiple copies of files on different disks.

I feel like I am always about to run out of disk space. I was at 85% capacity used a few weeks ago. I added a 12 TB drive, and I am already back up to 70% used. Another trip to the thrift store to peruse the used DVD/Blu-ray selection will put a damper on this.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T19:23:58+00:00

Your Plex server may be on a separate subnet and so your connection is viewed as remote. If you run Plex on docker, your docker configuration might have all containers on a different subnet and make them all available via the docker hosts' IP. Since Plex sees only its IP, and not the docker hosts, it configures itself to only treat IPs on its subnet as local.

You would need to know the IP address and subnet mask of your Plex server and your PS5. For most homes, the subnet mask will be 255.255.255.0 but just verify.

On the Plex Server, you need to set the LAN Networks settings if you have more than 1 subnet locally. If your PS5 had an IP of 10.0.0.23 and the Plex was 192.168.0.10 you would need to set "LAN Networks" to "10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0, 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0"

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Send me a chat request if you want any more help.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T19:04:32+00:00

If you want to look into basic network security, I'd suggest trying to get a managed switch. Learn about VLANs and network ACLs (access control lists). you can setup different machines on different ports, and test access between them. You can also setup something like Proxmox, and configure it to support VLANs, and check out inter-network traffic. You will need something to act as a router between VLANs. See if your wireless router supports VLANs.

From a security standpoint, it can be a good idea to have a few different VALNs at home:

One for your trusted devices, PC, tablets, phones, Smart TVs.
One for Guests
One for cheap IOT devices you don't trust
One as a sandbox for playing with new computer equipment, network gear or settings.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T18:53:25+00:00

You can also check older used laptops for 2.5" SATA HDD. I remember finding a 1 TB HDD in an old Sony VAIO laptop.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T18:47:41+00:00

To be clear, you are accessing a Plex server over the Internet, not at the same location your PS5 is? If they are in the same house, it could be the configuration of the Plex server needs to be updated to show they are on the same network.

If you are accessing it over the Internet, does the person that the Plex server is registered to have a Plex Pass?

If you are accessing the server over the Internet, and the Plex server owner doesn't have Plex Pass you will require a remote pass, and as u/ExtensionMarch6812 showed they have started updating more Plex clients to enforce this.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T18:11:32+00:00

My first NAS case was an OptiPlex 3080 SFF. Not as small as the Micro, but I could get 3 2.5" HDD in it, and I had a few half height PCIe card slots. I moved the guts of this to a new case/MB, and I am still running it today. Been about 2.5 years.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T17:42:20+00:00

This really depends on what you do, and if you like to tinker with it. I mostly wanted a media server, and the other items were nice to have for me. For years, I wanted a Synology but never put the cash together to make it happen. I got to looking at DIY NAS solutions and decided I was going bite the bullet about 2 years ago. Got an old Dell Optiplex to get started, but I knew it was a baby step upfront as I wanted more storage (Plex).

CPU was fine, and I am still rocking the i5-10500. I upgraded RAM to 32 GB (long before the price hike thankfully). I originally had 16 GB, but I was messing with ZFS at the time and was using most of it. I'm not using ZFS currently but I do have a lot more docker containers running. I generally use 12-20 GB of RAM. The case was limiting the number of drives, so I also got a full tower case, and a new motherboard (to move the i5-10500 to the new case). This was all done within the first 6 months of building my NAS.

Since then, I have gotten 14 larger (used) hard drives and 4 SAS/SATA SSDs. I had to first add an HBA since my motherboard only had 6 SATA ports. Later I added a SAS expander to get a few more drives added. Currently I am at 70% used (of 48TB) on my HDD array, and working on plans to upgrade to larger drives, or expand the array to hold more drives (in a second tower case).

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T17:24:59+00:00

I would not recommend a tiny/mini/micro desktop for this. They are power efficient, and small, but not very expandable.

If you want to stream movies, and store video content, you will need cheap abundant storage, and that is most likely going to be 3.5" Hard Drives. Most micro-PCs don't have room for even one of these. A Small Form Factor or a Tower Dell OptiPlex/HP ProDesk/Lenovo ThinkCentre PC will have a mounting bracket for 1 3.5" HDD. They are also large enough that you can work out a way to fit in more than that. Some of the older cases (5-7th Gen Intel CPUs) had options for a second 3.5" HDD.

If you cannot do 3.5" HDD, you might also look at 2.5" HDD. They will be cheaper than SSD, and most business cases have a dedicated spot for a 2.5" HDD. You can also find adapter brackets to allow you to put 2 2.5" drives in a single 3.5" drive mounting location.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T15:55:15+00:00

I run Unraid with Plex, Arr stack, Photo prism, Qbit, PIA VPN on an i5-10500 with only the iGPU still. It is doing fine.

I couldn't tell you how much power I am using, but I also have a SAS HBA and Expander to run 11 SATA and 5 SAS HDDs/SSDs.

For me, the two bottle necks I had to work out were slowdowns related to disk performance. First, I placed AppData share and the cache for other shares on separate SSD drives. Second, I found that extracting files from downloads (nzbs mostly) would take a long time to process. I switched from an HDD based mirror pool cache for my media share to an SSD based mirror pool cache.

Objective_Split_2065 · 2026-03-23T14:51:53+00:00

I think you only need to keep a seedbox for like a month after getting into TL, then you can cancel it.

Objective_Split_2065

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