Case Study
Storage and Hardware Research
This was about the time I was looking into joining multiple cloud providers to essentially cheese Plex into thinking I had more media at a time than I did.
This was when I found that not all cloud drive providers are equal. After all, there is no cloud; just someone else's drive.
Anyways, there's this neat site where you can compare: comparisontabl.es/cloud-storage
But from my own personal research, in order for this to work there's a couple of criteria the provider must have:
- Desktop Application — because if it's an online-only, USB-drive type of thing, then I can't really direct my Plex there. I've tried RClone, but it was terribly slow, so no thanks.
- Chunking Transfer — some online-only apps *cough* FolderFort have this thing where if you're uploading a large file it would crash halfway, making you reset the whole process again. What.
- Fast Transfer — need it to be able to download movies or TV fast enough to transcode if the file isn't on-demand already. My internet is fine, so I mainly mean fast from the cloud drive provider.
Conclusion
All of these have fast speeds, and don't require the file to actually be on your hard drive to be accepted by Plex (it will require download on scanning, but you can send them back to cloud only after — if someone "queues" the movie, then the drive.exe will start downloading it).
They can always scan your files for DMCA content and will remove it. It never happened to me personally, but sometimes I do see missing media, and yeah, I wonder if it was me who forgot to DL it or something else.
After some testing and trial, I decided that cloud drives were better for TV episodes and not heavy 4K movies, since at least the TV episodes were lighter and could be downloaded/processed faster.
After a few weeks though, I grew out of it and just wanted my own damn drives.
Up next
Cloud drives sorted, then abandoned — next is building out actual, owned hardware.