PR4100 as a Plex Server? Good move or Bad?

The reason I chose a Chromecast is because it means less action from the moment you decide to watch a movie, and the moment you’re watching it. I found it really useful to sit on my sofa, open Plex on my smatphone, and that’s it, all my movies ready to be played. No other box, no other interface, no other remote as you could have with a Nvidia Shield, Zidoo, or a mini PC as an HTPC.

About the post you mentioned, it’s saying that you can’t direct stream a 4K video from Plex to a CC Ultra. As I don’t have any 4k video, I couldn’t verify. But that’s good to know. I wonder if a My Cloud PR*100 could transcode a 4k HEVC. I’d say it couldn’t lol.
But what I was saying, is that you can’t direct stream a 1080p HEVC video to a CC Ultra out of the box. You’ll need to change the chromecast profile (ie chromecast.xml) on your Plex Media Server. And the topic also provide a chromecast profile. I think there is many chromecast profiles (all working) on internet, created by some guys who had run into this issue.

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No, the PR4100 will require reconfiguring when you add or change size of HDD’s, configuring drives wipes them clean, so buy (4) 10TB HDD all at one time. If you buy a PR4100 with drives installed from WDC, you get a longer warranty, than buying diskless and shopping drives around.

Wow, what a throwback. I totally forgot I made this post.

I purchased two of the 8TB EasyStore drives like I’d mentioned. I never got around to purchasing the PR4100 drive because I still have ~400GB left on my original MyCloud Mirror drives. I’ve thought about it a bit though, since the two drives still sit in their boxes on the floor in the corner of my bedroom…

I’ve thought about just picking up two more drives when they go on sale again so I have a full set of like-model drives and then I can just purchase the PR4100 (or whatever device makes sense at the time when I finally get around to it) and set it all up together.

Are you positive that the PR4100 setup will not permit the configuration of two additional drives as a mirrored volume after an initial setup? The other users seemed to indicate that this would be possible.

Yes, I bought a PR-4100, from WD, with 4 - 8TB HDD (Total 32TB) configured it with RA!D 5 for speed and protection leaving 16TB and quickly filled it using it as a PLEX Server. Then WD came out with their 10TB drives and I called asking upgrading 1 at a time and they said I could replace a 8TB with a 10TB but the 10TB would use just 8TB until all four drives were replaced and THEN you have to reconfigure the RAID to get all 40TB available for however you wish to configure it, RAID 0,1,5 etc. That reconfigure task wipes the drives as part of the process, it’s not at all like a hot swapping and/or auto-expansion of your existing configured RAID.

That said I haven’t done anything except not I off loaded some data and now have 3 separate Plex Media Servers running. I even tried to get WD Support to agree that 12TB drives would work making a bigger upgrade worth my time, but they stuck with 10TB HDD as max for now.

You don’t have to wipe the volume to extend it.

I know you don’t have to wipe a volume to extend it from experience, but is there some proprietary formatting or setup that the drive looks for when setting up a raid in the fashion that I was looking to do? I really figured it would be plug and play.

It’s just a typical software mdadm raid. As long as you upgrade all drives with a full raid rebuild per drive you can extend the filesystem after the last the last drive, keeping all data. Note that each rebuild will take 2 days… probably not worth the risk for an extra 6TB in total.

You don’t want disks to get wiped automatically… you trigger a rebuild manually.