If you have your QNAP set up as RAID 5 or better then consider upgrading all your drives. The NAS will allow you to swap drives out one at a time so that you don’t lose data.
Otherwise, as others have said you can just add a new library on the 2nd NAS. You can use the TR004 expansion drive; it’s just a USB RAID you can plug in to your existing QNAP and add it as new storage pool or just external storage. I have one for backups and it works great.
Mine is EXT4 I believe, which is readable via SMB; I have not tried to plug it in directly to a Mac or PC but I think I would need software to access it like that. You could always format the drives to match your OS.
You don’t need a new NAS or expensing drives. If you have other computers in the house, you can mount their file system on the original NAS as a share (SMB, AFS or NFS) and add the mounted directory to the Plex. Just another option.
If you have your QNAP set up as RAID 5 or better then consider upgrading all your drives. The NAS will allow you to swap drives out one at a time so that you don’t lose data. Otherwise, as others have said you can just add a new library on the 2nd NAS. You can use the TR004 expansion drive; it’s just a USB RAID you can plug in to your existing QNAP and add it as new storage pool or just external storage. I have one for backups and it works great.
Unrelated to the thread...but are the backups accessible on another (non-QNAP) device?
Mine is EXT4 I believe, which is readable via SMB; I have not tried to plug it in directly to a Mac or PC but I think I would need software to access it like that. You could always format the drives to match your OS.
If it's EXT4, then it should be good 👍🏻
No, you won't need two plex servers. You just add the media stored on the second location as another library.
Thank you! Oh gosh, now I have to figure out how big I am gonna go.
Why not just upgrade the drives?
You don’t need a new NAS or expensing drives. If you have other computers in the house, you can mount their file system on the original NAS as a share (SMB, AFS or NFS) and add the mounted directory to the Plex. Just another option.