Perc 5i for Media Server?

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Spaceninja

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I'm getting ready to build a new media server for the house and looking to put in 4x 2tb HDD's in a RAID 5. I'm using Plex to stream to the Roku's in the house. Normally there is only going to be one stream going at a time. I know the controller will support the drives, but will it be fast enough to stream a 2 to 4gb movie over the network without any buffering?

My current server is just using a bunch of single drives with the media scattered among them.

I'm not looking to spend a ton of money on a RAID controller as this isn't exactly mission critical data. I just want a dedicated controller and not a software controlled device.
 
Spaceninja said:
I'm getting ready to build a new media server for the house and looking to put in 4x 2tb HDD's in a RAID 5. I'm using Plex to stream to the Roku's in the house. Normally there is only going to be one stream going at a time. I know the controller will support the drives, but will it be fast enough to stream a 2 to 4gb movie over the network without any buffering?

My current server is just using a bunch of single drives with the media scattered among them.

I'm not looking to spend a ton of money on a RAID controller as this isn't exactly mission critical data. I just want a dedicated controller and not a software controlled device.
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So you're going to be using the RAID card to do the RAIDing? Bad idea there... software RAID is much more reliable. Lose the card? drop any old card in there that'll handle the drives. Lose the card in a hardware RAID? Good luck hunting down the exact same (or very similar) card.
The only reason I have a RAID card in my fileserver/plex box is that it's the easiest way to get a controller to handle 8 drives once you flash the thing to IT mode.

Plex shouldn't use much of any processor time for in house streaming to a Roku as long as you're streaming video it can handle. Even then if you go with linux mdadm RAID instead of something like ZFS it uses almost nothing for processor time, even under load.
 
Mainly I wanted the hardware raid card for redundancy and ease of rebuilding the array. I haven't had much luck with software RAID cards in the past, any suggestions for a reliable card?
 
He is not talking about sofware raid cards at all. Its about having your OS (preferably not windows) do the raid and using a non raid card or cards or even your motherboard ports.

zfs is available for several non windows operating systems so is plex.
 
Honestly, you should not even need RAID or a RAID card. I use a single 4TB drive for movies and another one for TV shows with a 120 GB old Vertex 3 SSD for cache/temp storage for Plex. I can stream up to 10 different items at a time with half being transcodes with no problems at all right now. I have even tested more clients streaming at one time, but some of the clients were SD. Were you having throughput problems before?
 
The only real issue I am having it the latest update to the Plex server broke itself so I had to go back to a previous version. All the other updates I have done in the past are fine. Current Server specs are Core i5 3450s, 8GB ram, Running Windows Server 2012R2. I have a 250GB HDD for OS, 1TB drive for media, and a 500GB for temp storage. Backups are going to a 2tb external drive, brand escapes me at the moment.
 
So what I do, and I know everyone will have a problem with this, is when I purchase a new drive, say when I bought my two 4 TB drives, (one for movies the other for tv shows), I put the old drives on the shelf as sudo spares/backups. Now, the old drives will not have all the data the new drives have, since I continue to add to them over time, but at least if one of the current drives fails, I would only have to update what has changed, and not have to re-rip my entire library. Actually lately I just put new BD disks in a box and they never get opened and static wrap still intact. Unless you have more than 6 clients streaming 4K movies at the same time, a single disk should be fine.
 
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