After I had two WD drives fail in my old NAS so I switched to all Seagate on my next build. Currently running 9x 20TB Exos X20, though for only about a year now, so no issues should be expected, yet.

I think the most important thing is that you pick a drive that is meant for NAS/server use (so rated for running 24/7). And having manufacturere warrenty is also nice. My Seagate drives have 60 months (which is considerably more then the 36 months that my WD drives had).

In that case, I’d just stick to fixing it by hand.

I have a around 600 TV shows in my library and only had to manually match a dozen or so.

I know I can put metadata on the folder name of a series (like the show id of themoviedb), but I really don’t want to do this, as I have another mediaserver server (Kodi) the same library to my Smart-TV. It would mess up that libary

https://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/Movies

Kodi supports the same “{sourceid-xxxx}” tag syntax as jellyfin or plex, so it wouldn’t mess anything up.

The reasoning is that drives are produced and shipped in batches and if you order multiple at onces there is a higher chance you’ll get drives from the same batch. If that batch had some fault during production or it was damaged during shipping, all your drives might be affected.

I don’t have a source, but it’s something multiple expirenced people have mentioned to me.

Ah, my bad.

I’m using Synology/DMS and there you have a pretty neat GUI that lists newly detected drives and let’s you assign them to your storage pool and rebuild the raid. I’d expect it to be quite similar on software like TrueNAS Rockstor.

My first question is about different drives. Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs? (I assume yes)

You can.

2nd question: how does the replacement process go? Like if drive A died, so I remove it, and put a brand new replacement in. What do I have to do with btrfs to get the raid 1 back going? Any links or guides would be amazing.

Depends on what NAS/Software you have. If your NAS supports hot-swaps you can just pull out the defective drive and plug in another. Otherwise you’ll have to shut it down, swap the drive and turn it back on.

If you have already have the spare drive ready and you have slots availible, you can run a “hot spare”. This way you can even start the raid rebuild if you’re not physically near your NAS (like when a drive fails while you’re on holiday or sm).

On a synology NAS you can use SHR-1 raid (which is basically raid 5) with just two disks. In pratice that acts like raid 1, but you can just add more drives and it will act like raid 5.

Not sure if other NAS have similar custom raids.

I would at least add two additional 20TB drives and put them into a raid 5. That gives you around 40TB of usuable space and you can have one disk failure.

I’m running a plex server on my NAS and use plexamp to stream music.

I payed about $350 for my 20TB drives, which at the rate offered here would pay of in less then 3 months. Add some overhead in for a NAS and some extra drives for a raid and it still easily pays of in half a year.

Shitty deal.

Synology has it’s own version of raid5 that can handle your specific disk configuration without any modification:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator?drives=4 TB|4 TB|4 TB|4 TB|2 TB|2 TB&raid=SHR_1|RAID_5

Not sure if similar things are availible on other platforms.

.mkv is just a container and can contain any encode. All my av1 encodes are .mkv files.

But the majority of my videos are in h264 for compatability, though I’ve been adding more av1 and h265 encodes lateley. But storage isn’t much of a concern for me.

Pretty much a perfect 1 Gigabit, because that’s my LAN speed and my server is at home :(