u/Minute_Committee_131

In recent years I have collected and ripped a lot of TV shows and Movies. I know I should take backups of everything as well as leave some overhead for Jellyfin itself. My big question is as I build a NAS later on for a home movie theater what are some drive options out there that are affordable, durable, and don’t die after a couple of uses/years. My oldest drive is 5 years old with roughly 45,000 life hours on it (WD Black 4TB) and I feel it’s necessary for me to upgrade soon. With the context to not only expand my current 13TB of storage for more than what I have now I want support for raid 5 setup and also have extra space for new upcoming titles/shows and space for home photos and video instead of paying for cloud storage monthly. What are some of your picks?

Finally got my Jellyfin back the way I had it before I had to start over from drive failure on a different drive. My question is asked because I haven’t found a good way to get to movies fast enough if in a browsing to find something to watch. So what I did was I created a script that takes your Jellyfin metadata and creates a file compiled of all you movies with the genres they go in categories then a second script that makes hard copies of the shortcuts that get generated in each genre folder. From there in Jellyfin I have a category for each genre but also one for the physical locations to all movies. The issue I came across by doing this is yes it solves the problem of narrowing everything down by genre but in turn creates a whole new problem.

By doing this Jellyfin then detects the same movie multiple times due to the hard shortcuts. So what that ultimately means is Jellyfin includes each one of those as a separate movie which means it creates more than one listing in the search results. Also when scanning media it essentially counts it as a separate movie making your actual movie count inaccurate. For example 2000 movies then become 6,000-8,000 due to miscounting. To fix the first issue you can merge versions but by doing so it shows multiple on the same movies listing making it hard for users to find different versions of the movie as it can be buried under a list of the same movies listing making same quality (duplication glitch). My question is do I deal with what I have now and keep it separated and just don’t use search or do I get rid of categories and make it harder to find stuff just browsing way and better search?

Edit: Yes I have used collections in the past and yes that helps cut down the list of movies but creates even more menus to get to the movie I want to watch if it has sequels. I know this looks weird but the main reason I did it this way is because primary viewing is on a smart tv so having the tiles does make it more manageable. Also on some devices random shuffling is missing under movies so getting a movie at random is not possible so to narrow down everything I have the tiles. The reason being is because even if I could pull up the menu and sort that way it’s again buried behind menus and takes to long whereas a tile is right there.

What are some hard drives you recommend for long term (raid 5 supported)?

Do you find this to be too much?