Migrating from Macmini & external HDD

[vestan_pance]

Hi, first post newbie questions!

I take delivery of a TVS-473 8GB with 4*6TB WD Red tomorrow ( ) and I intend to configure it to RAID 10 and use it as my primary storage and Plex media server.

Currently I've got 6TB of data on a couple of external WD drives, backed up via Time Machine to a Drobo. I also use backblaze as my secondary backup of everything.

I plan to migrate all my data over ethernet and have a few questions:

1) During migration will I be able to watch an occasional movie on Plex on my current setup without risking the migration or damage to the HDDs? Should I disable virus checker and Time Machine backups?

2) I read some comments on Plex that I shouldn't install QNAP's Qsirch app as it is a memory hog. Does this mean searching will be painfully slow or would I be able to use Spotlight via my ethernet connected mini or via wifi on my Mac Book Pro?

3) Other comments in the Plex forums suggested I be mindful of using the QNAP media library folders and options when adding my media as it can cause ffmpeg to use up 100% of the processor for hours. Is it relatively straightforward to disable this feature?

I'm really looking forward to getting everything set up but I'm in no rush to screw things up!

Thanks in advance

VP.

[dolbyman]

0.1) Why RAID10 ? RAID6 is more secure if you need up to two drives redundancy

1) No, unless you use 10GBE, your disks will not even be close to their limit, not sure how anything is supposed to damage the disks

2) No idea about any of those apps

3) No need to run several media server apps then, if you run PLEX disable all other DLNA servers

[vestan_pance]

RAID 10 should give me the best mix of redundancy and performance my logic being that performance will be important because it has to be able to manage at least 2 seperate 1080p transcode sessions at the same time, possibly 3 to cater for family needs.

[dolbyman]

Forget the performance of the drives, be more worried about the performance of the CPU's in regards to performance

I can stream several 4K streams (no transcoding) with no problem (30-40MB/s overall) so HDD speed is not an issue here

[vestan_pance]

Cool, and this is all through Plex? So what benefit will Raid 6 give me over 10?

[dolbyman]

no I use twonky, Plex does not run on my 7 year old ARM powered NAS (on the other end are Smart TVs, Smartphones and KODI clients)

RAID5 any one drive can fail
RAID6 any two drives can fail
RAID10 if the wrong two drives fail, your data is toast

[vestan_pance]

Thanks, that's helpful.. and if the drive performance is negligible then it might be best to go with 6.

Say if I carried out a test and tried RAID6 first, how much effort would it be to reconfigure to RAID10 - I'm thinking of testing out both setups with three 1080p movies transcoding to 3 separate devices. If the box can manage that in RAID6 I'd be happy and no need to go to RAID10.

[dolbyman]

there is no migration path, so if you want to go for testing you have to delete the RAID volume and create a new one

[vestan_pance]

Ok, no major drama I guess.

[P3R]

RAID 10 should give me the best mix of redundancy...

RAID 10 will be at most a few per cent faster when writing than RAID 6 but RAID 6 reliability is far superior to RAID 10.

You don't need to test it, someone else already did.

RAID 10 is preferable in some busy enterprise applications but in home and SMB applications RAID 6 (or RAID 5) is almost always a better choice despite that almost every "RAID-expert" on the internet will try to sell you the myth of RAID 10 being superior for everything...

[vestan_pance]

Thank you, I decided to go with RAID 6 and the box os currently 9 hours into setup. Guess this might take a while to complete.