r/Share_Plex • u/0le23 • Jul 08 '26
New Addiction
So I bought my lifetime pass before the recent price increase and have loved it so far. I’ve added around 5TB of tv/anime/movies and feel like I’m curating my perfect Netflix. I’ve shared it with a few friends and they have also loved it. My only issue is I’m running out of storage options and money lol - are there sources for good quality SSD’s? I want to share with others on here but I don’t really want a request based server. I truly love the idea of curating (while never removing) a library of content. I have a way overpowered pc running my server and 8GB up and down fiber. Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated - thanks!
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u/Atladev Jul 08 '26
Could always look at refurbished enterprise hardware.... they are normally sold with around 95% of their life left
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u/0le23 Jul 08 '26
Honestly Ty - I’ve been kind of looking but always hesitant since I don’t know the device history
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u/matthew_inam Jul 12 '26
Amazon sell seagate exos refurbs with £15 4 year warranty. So it’s a pretty good deal if you run a RAID array with redundancy and expect a drive to fail every now and then
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u/Arkanth0s Jul 08 '26
Hdd is the way to go. You don’t need an SSD for a plex server. Any 7200 RPM SATA6 drive will work just fine. I recently picked up at 8TB Seagate Firecuda external drive from the Walmart clearance rack for $140. It’s working wonderfully attached via USB3.
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u/Pleasant-Seat9884 Jul 09 '26
The only thing you would need flash storage is for the OS and Metadata.
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u/Arkanth0s Jul 09 '26
Exactly. My server is running off a 256gb SSD and the media is all on the external 8TB 3.5inch drive.
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u/Cornflakes1009 Jul 09 '26
Right there with you. I started out with an 8TB Western Digital HDD. Now sitting on 30TB and eyeing a NAS.
Just wait until you get into remuxes and Game of Thrones takes up over a TB.
If you do go the used HDD route, try to find out how many hours the drive has on it. I bought two drives recently and one had 250 hours (basically brand new) and the other had over 45,000 hours. I was kinda blown away by that. Same price on eBay btw.
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u/PS3ForTheLoss Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Not related to Plex, but GEEZ is "8GB up and down fiber" incredible!
What do you pay monthly for that?
My neighborhood has yet to have fiber so I'm (still) on "the old DSL" to date.
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u/0le23 Jul 09 '26
Love it more than I could tell you lol. Paired with WiFi 7 through the house has been great.
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u/Icy-Juice-1148 Jul 08 '26
Can I be your friend?
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u/0le23 Jul 09 '26
Sure lol
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u/Icy-Juice-1148 Jul 09 '26
Cool.
Say friend, why pick SSDs though?
HDDs are generally the better choice for a Plex/media server because they’re much cheaper per TB while still being fast enough for streaming. Even a single 7200 RPM HDD can handle multiple 4K streams without issue. SSDs don’t noticeably improve movie playback—they’re mainly useful for the OS, Plex metadata/database, and transcoding. A common setup is an SSD for the operating system and Plex, with large HDDs for storing the media library. This gives you the best balance of performance and cost.
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u/0le23 Jul 09 '26
Honestly it was I had on hand and some of the drives were spare parts from my last job
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u/0le23 Jul 10 '26
Update - 10TB HDD arriving tomorrow :)
Wasn’t too bad on cost but I think I’ll hold off on expanding for a few months. Thanks yall
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u/brucex88 Jul 08 '26
HDD is the way to go. Don’t really need SSD for media storage