Android Box

[Tom Saurus]

Turning a Rasberry Pi into a media sever with Plex:

https://youtu.be/5wzSbqQgRS0

I am practically drooling over that great price he paid for that 8 TB hard drive. When he says "as long as Raspberry Pi is online" when it comes to Plex the various devices can connect to it. So does that mean the internet has to be running; you can't just the router stream it around? I would rather be offline and streaming. Though I have to learn all these things because as much as I want to have a media server and a raspberry pi and the list goes on; I have other things that come before these luxuries.

[jagabo]

When he says "as long as Raspberry Pi is online" when it comes to Plex the various devices can connect to it. So does that mean the internet has to be running; you can't just the router stream it around?

I don't know about using Plex. But this is one reason I prefer to use a dumb file server. The server just shares files across the LAN -- it doesn't know or care what they are. It's up to the clients to know what to do with them. No internet access needed.

[Tom Saurus]

jagabo: Thank you for your input. Thank you to you and all the other posters here at VideoHelp who give advice and share their knowledge the whole year round. Seasons Greetings and know that a whole lot of people including myself are thankful and grateful for all that we learn here.

[Seeker47]

When he says "as long as Raspberry Pi is online" when it comes to Plex the various devices can connect to it. So does that mean the internet has to be running; you can't just the router stream it around?

I don't know about using Plex. But this is one reason I prefer to use a dumb file server. The server just shares files across the LAN -- it doesn't know or care what they are. It's up to the clients to know what to do with them. No internet access needed.

But you'd still need to have a computer (or NAS) running 24/7, something I have avoided doing, and not because of the cost of electricity. Even what passes for Enterprise class HDDs these days won't keep running indefinitely under that regime. My router is always ON though, of course. In these parts, where power is under threat of being cut by the utility when high winds / high fire danger periods occur, or during parts of the summer when the grid is being stressed, the utility likes to keep advising us to unplug everything that is not absolutely essential. Yeah, well -- "F" that ! It's just not practical -- or even particularly smart -- in the so tech-dependent world we live in.

[Clockwork]

But you'd still need to have a computer (or NAS) running 24/7, something I have avoided doing, and not because of the cost of electricity. Even what passes for Enterprise class HDDs these days won't keep running indefinitely under that regime.

I just replaced a 2TB Seagate drive in my file server that runs 24/7.
I write the date on the drive at the moment I install it and it goes into service...the date on this one was September 2011.
I was having problems mounting the drive on about half of the boots, so I decided better safe than sorry and replaced it, although I do regular full image backups of all drives.
Sometimes you get lucky and end up with a quite resilient piece of hardware.

[Seeker47]

But you'd still need to have a computer (or NAS) running 24/7, something I have avoided doing, and not because of the cost of electricity. Even what passes for Enterprise class HDDs these days won't keep running indefinitely under that regime.

I just replaced a 2TB Seagate drive in my file server that runs 24/7.
I write the date on the drive at the moment I install it and it goes into service...the date on this one was September 2011.
I was having problems mounting the drive on about half of the boots, so I decided better safe than sorry and replaced it, although I do regular full image backups of all drives.
Sometimes you get lucky and end up with a quite resilient piece of hardware.

That's an interesting report. Some readers here go back quite a ways (as do I) and may recall the SCSI HDDs ? I ran several of the top of the line, Enterprise class IBM ones that used to be made in Hungary. I think their official MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) spec was huge. (They did require special controllers, adapters, and drivers, which in retrospect now seems a nuisance. Of course, their capacity back then was not anywhere near the TB range, but the stuff we ran in those days was also nowhere near as demanding on storage space as is commonly the case in more recent years.) Some of them ran 24/7 for extended periods. I ran a few of these for about as long as you mentioned; not one of them ever failed, although I did retire a few for semi-obsolescence concerns. Their capacity or speed was no longer up to prevailing standards. Anyone recall those 15,000 RPM HDDs (regular IDE ?) that were pricey but in vogue for awhile ? I still have one of those, in a long retired computer, and I'm guessing that it would probably still work just fine.

HDDs got a lot cheaper (along with the capacities going way up), and so must be being manufactured a lot cheaper. The point of my post was my wondering whether these could still have the sort of durability I experienced with those mentioned above ? A partial answer may be that in all the many WD Black (Made in Thailand) internal HDDs -- and also the portable ones, like the Passport series -- which I've been buying for years, I have not had any failures. But then none of these are being run 24/7 . . . .

[Those full image backups of important boot or storage drives is a very good idea. I do that, but could and probably should do it more often.]