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External HD for Movies

G

GDF

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 7, 2010
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I have a 2012 iMac and would like to store movies that I watch through Plex on an external hard drive. Is that possible and if so, which hard drive is recommended?

My movies keep getting uploaded to the Cloud via iDrive and I don’t want those too. I don’t keep them that long. Thanks!
 
Using an external drive to store your movies for Plex would work fine. That is what I do.

I would recommend TWO 3.5 inch spinner HDD drives with external power supplies of 4-8 TB (size depends on the volume of movies with room for new additions). I would recommend 2 different manufacturers for the drives to mitigate possible problems with manufacturer defects. The reason for 2 drives are for a Primary and Backup. Once a week (or sooner if I've added many recent movies/shows) I connect the Backup to the Mac and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the Primary to the Backup. I've used OWC, Seagate, & Western Digital drives.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I USB3 for connectivity.
 
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CoastalOR said:
Using an external drive to store your movies for Plex would work fine. That is what I do.

I would recommend TWO 3.5 inch spinner HDD drives with external power supplies of 4-8 TB (size depends on the volume of movies with room for new additions). I would recommend 2 different manufacturers for the drives to mitigate possible problems with manufacturer defects. The reason for 2 drives are for a Primary and Backup. Once a week (or sooner if I've added many recent movies/shows) I connect the Backup to the Mac and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the Primary to the Backup. I've used OWC, Seagate, & Western Digital drives.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I USB3 for the for connectivity.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the feedback. I am thinking I only need 500gb or less, as when I am done with the movie, I delete it, so never have more than 100gb or 150gb of movies. Knowing that would you go with a Samsung SSD. I know the T5 was popular at one point, which I think is now the T7.
 
Your USB ports are limited to USB3 speeds so you wouldn't be able to use the full performance of the Samsung T7 with the USB ports but for storing movies it would be way more than fast enough.

When you get a new Mac at some point in the future you'd then be able to use the full speed of the drive.

A Thunderbolt dock would provide ports with faster performance but would be much more expensive and overkill if not using it as a boot drive.
 
mdgm said:
Your USB ports are limited to USB3 speeds so you wouldn't be able to use the full performance of the Samsung T7 with the USB ports but for storing movies it would be way more than fast enough.

When you get a new Mac at some point in the future you'd then be able to use the full speed of the drive.

A Thunderbolt dock would provide ports with faster performance but would be much more expensive and overkill if not using it as a boot drive.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I do plan on upgrading when a new iMac comes up or possible the new mini.

So, this would be the one you are talking about - right?

www.bestbuy.com

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Yes. It'll come with a few cables. One for connecting to older computers with a Type A USB3 port and another for connecting to a newer faster port found on newer computers.
 
my movies (~ 2 TB) are in iTunes and stored on a 4 TB WD easy store external drive, works very well for me ... easy to stream to my Apple TV in the living room ...
 
Cool - thanks for all of the help. Just ordered it!
 
I have 2 1TB external hard drives for movies and tv show.
my toshiba and seagate works both in macbook /dell xps and features every Oscar winner i can watch.
along with other movies like 21 grams which im watching on a samsumg tv As i type.
both are usb a with an usb adaptor for the dell xsp.
im sending the sound to a bose sound touch for nice sound.
i guess what im typing is anything that will store mp4 will work and you can enjoy what ever and when ever you want!
 
I use two Probox 4-bay enclosures (Amazon link 1 Cheaper Link 2). This is also available with RAID, as well as USB 3.1 and type C connector. They all work great. You can put up to 4x 16TB drives into each enclosure. I use them with different drives, grown over the years, my largest is 14TB, Hitachi. I use one as proimary and the other as backup, which I only connect now and then and sync with rsync under linux. They have been operating for many years already (must be close to 10 now) without issue.
 
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It's a waste of space to store lots of movies on the internal drive.
Keeping them on an external drive is a better idea.

But -- as suggested above -- if you value what's on the external storage drive, you'll also need to back it up to another drive. You should never trust important data to a single drive.

CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper can be used to clone and maintain the backup.
Done this way, the backup will be an EXACT COPY of the source drive.
 
GDF has a small library so using an external SSD makes sense. If GDF had or expected to have several TBs of data then of course a solution using hard drives would be the way to go.
 
I really do. When I checked today it was only 110gb. I literally delete the movie when I am done watching it. :)
 
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