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Decided to put my network to use and make a home Plex server using the QNAP TS664-8G-US with 6 30TB Seagate M drives, as I have over 3000 movies and around 90 TV Series. I am just wondering at this point if it sufficient to go RAID5 or, with this many drives, should I go RAID6? Or something completely different.
Using each, how much HDD space can I expect to have (aprox)?
Thanks for the help. Love the YouTube channel, as I watch everything relevant to my needs.
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In short, RAID 5 will give you more capacity, but RAID 6 gives you significantly more fault tolerance, which becomes more important the larger your array gets and the bigger the drives you’re using. With 30TB drives, rebuild times on RAID 5 can be long and put you at risk if another drive fails during the rebuild — and that’s exactly what RAID 6 is designed to protect against.
Here’s what the usable capacity looks like:
• RAID 5 (1 drive worth of redundancy): You’ll get the equivalent of 5 drives’ worth of space.
So with 6 x 30TB, you’ll end up with approximately 150TB usable.
• RAID 6 (2 drives worth of redundancy): You’ll get 4 drives’ worth of space.
That brings you down to about 120TB usable.
Given the scale of your media collection, the size of each drive, and the value of the data, I’d strongly recommend RAID 6. Yes, it means giving up an extra 30TB of capacity compared to RAID 5, but you gain much more peace of mind — especially since rebuilds on 30TB drives can take a long time, even with good CPU and RAM support. That second parity drive can make the difference between a successful recovery and a total loss if another drive starts showing errors mid-rebuild.
If you’re not in a rush to fill the entire array straight away, another option would be to start with 4 drives in RAID 6 (giving you 60TB usable) and then add the final two later to expand the volume. QNAP makes that process pretty smooth via their storage manager.
