I currently have a WD PR4100 NAS with four 4 TB drives (16 TB total space) with a Raid 10, giving me 8 TB of usable space. It is now 95% full and I needed to upgrade.
With the lowest prices I have every seen (at Best Buy), I just purchased four 10 TB drives (40 TB total) and a brand new empty WD PR4100. Which after setting up the Raid will give me an additional 20 TB of usable space.
Both PR4100s will have the latest OS 5 version.
So now I will have my original PR4100 with a Raid 10 (which is nearly full) and new blank PR4100 to add to it.
My question is… is there any way to expand my current Raid 10 or actually probably my Volume Virtualization to expand it with my second PR4100?
I have everything setup perfectly on my current PR4100, including a VERY customized and manually configured Plex server. It would be awesome just to be able to expand the available storage available with what I currently have vs having two totally separate network storage units that are not linked or connected together.
There are probably a dozen reasons why you don’t want to create a single volume spanning two NAS units.
Having said that;
I think Plex is not restricted on having video files in one spot. Can’t you have the plex library on one NAS reference files on the other NAS? (I used to run Plex servers off of both a PC and a NAS - - and both server programs referenced files on the same NAS)
Why is it so hard to think of the possible simple solutions first??? LOL
I am confirming on the Plex Forums if I only move the media (movies / TV episodes) and point to the new PR4100 media folder network location in the Plex server settings (while keeping the Plex server as is on my current PR4100).
If this does not screw up all of my custom collections, metadata, etc… it will be an easy solution. But I will have to see what challenges the devil in the details may pose.
I will report back if this solution is an option… or not from a Plex perspective.
Yes. I have backups of the data and I will have a backup of the Plex database later tonight. The reason Plex is such a concern is that I have hundreds of hours with customizing the server, metadata, personalized collections, audiobooks (which is all manual setup). The media is personally created (no dubious sources) which takes years to build up.
It looks like I will be able to take the suggestion above to keep the Plex server on my current PR4100 NAS and then just move the media (which is the lion share of all the space) on to the new PR4100. After that point Plex to the next location and have Plex scan. Plex Moving Media Folder Location Guide
I have the new PR4100 but I am waiting on the new 10TB harddrives to arrive on Thursday. So this next week, I will know for sure how it goes!!!
Until then… I am making sure all my backups are current and covers everything.
