HDD's Join or Add

[DJkhaled 8]

Running an average windows computer what is better for speed when it comes to load time for clients? Joining 2 hard drives together using disk management or adding a second hard drive to the folders with emby.

[muzicman0 84]

For a media server, unless really heavily loaded, I doubt you would notice a difference.  Depending on what you mean by 'joining', if 1 drive fails, you could be at risk for loosing all of the data.  I would have a tendency to use multiple individual drives each assigned a drive letter (assuming Windows).

No matter which you choose though, make sure you have a way to backup the data.  It can be painful to spend money on a 'what if', but even more painful to lose all your data!

[Happy2Play 9785]

I would say some of us use drivepooling software to pool all of your drives.

[rbjtech 5284]

I've had these decisions to make over the years and I've now settled on just using JBOD's and adding folders in emby.

Simplicity, backup and recovery is the key reason.  

[Spaceboy 2573]

personally as someone who has a relatively high turnover of media (upgrades in quality as they become available) i would go the drive pooling method. JBOD is fine but it can take a lot of admin if you have a lot of activity in terms of adding and changing your library and drive pooling just takes that all away. There is no downside other than a small cost and you get additional backup/duplication tools as well

[ebr 16195]

9 hours ago, Happy2Play said:

I would say some of us use drivepooling software to pool all of your drives.

I would definitely look into this.  Can make life so much easier across all your systems and adding/swapping drives a breeze.

[DJkhaled 8]

Thanks for all the replies, leaning towards drivepooling.

[rbjtech 5284]

3 hours ago, DJkhaled said:

Thanks for all the replies, leaning towards drivepooling.

Whatever option you choose, remember data redundancy is not a backup - so if you value the data (and the time and effort you used to get it there) - then have a tested (ie restored) offline copy available. 

[Junglejim 385]

As @rbjtech mentioned backup is the key! I personally use raid 0 (striped) set of disks, crazy I know.. but has its benefits. But I have two backups just in case.

Edited August 13, 2021 by Junglejim

[DJkhaled 8]

Thanks guys, appreciated. My backup will be going in my SUV on a mini pc to play music videos as well as movies & tv offline most of the time as emby needs to get online from time to time. My idea for this is to use an openwrt router that connects to open wifi hotspots only either that or use my pineapple to do it WiFi Pineapple - Hak5 Connects to anything that's open wifi so I'm thinking it should do what I want. My wifi antenna will be connected outside the SUV you won't even see it as seen in the pic it just sticks on the roof. What I would like to know is how often does emby need to be online to keep things running smooth with cover art ?

[rbjtech 5284]

Unless you refresh the metadata (by default it is not scheduled to refresh at all) then the only need for internet access is new items added and occasionally checking the emby license status.  Any reasonable wifi hotspot should be sufficient for this.