Upgrading My Plex Server With a new TerraMaster NAS and Seagate IronWolf Pro Drives!

Setup

While I have experience using them, I’ve never actually had to set up a NAS this large before, so I was a little unfamiliar with how long it would really take. The short answer is ironically really long. Inserting the drives, easy enough, but initialisation can take quite a long time to complete, even more so if you have very large capacity drives like I do, so while I can do the installation of the drives and first boot in about 20mins, it took a few hours for the NAS to become responsive to operate all of the hard drives. And then, the long bit starts.

Building a RAID is a lengthy process, it took until the next day before I was able to proceed. The kind of RAID, the kind of drives, and more are all factors here, so I can’t tell you how long each configuration would take. However, pop it on, and just go away, come back the next day in most cases.

These day-long rebuilds are certainly more indicative of me using large capacity drives though. However, with RAID 5 offering a single drive redundancy, if one drive should fail, I can take it out, pop in a new blank one, and let the RAID rebuild. Again, that’ll take many hours, but once done, you’re ready to go and your data is protected. Another advantage of RAID 5 is its performance. Because the data is striped across all the drives, you’ll get 4x read performance but 1x write performance. This is great for a Plex server, as if multiple people are pulling 4K movie files at once, your read requirements would exceed that of a single HDD. While write speeds are still limited to the speed of a single drive, the drive can still keep up with my broadband when downloading and writing data. I currently get around 1150Mbps down, so it all works out rather nicely.

I also made some modifications, as the NAS will be sitting on a small shelf in a large pantry cupboard (ventilated) and in my garage where it can’t be heard clicking away at night. That being said, can’t have people tinkering with it without my permission.

The airflow is actually really good, and for peace of mind, it’s been sitting there doing what it does best for six months now, and temperatures have been excellent throughout, it even survived all the recent record breaking UK heatwaves and didn’t skip a beat through that either. I’d use both LAN ports too if it wasn’t for the 20M run required to reach the router.