Kodi Community Forum

I'm pretty new to Kodi. I have Kodi running on my new NUC7 i5 under Windows 10, with media stored on my old QNAP 4-bay NAS (4 x 2TB). My NAS is RAID 5 and I have 6TB usable storage, but this is not enough drive storage. Using my QNAP is extremely slow and playback is not very solid.

I'd like to ditch my QNAP NAS and instead connect drives directly to my NUC. I'm not very experienced with Windows 10, and I'd like to get some suggestions about storage options that perform well and are reliable. The NUC has USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt.

- Should I get a large capacity USB 3.0 drive for my media  - maybe 10 or 12TB? (and I'd get a second one for backup)
- Should I consider a RAID enclosure? I'd rather not pay lots of $ for a large RAID and then need another drive for backup - this is likely very expensive.

I appreciate any advice!

-Bob

A 10TB external drive is hard to find but you could buy an external enclosure and put a 10TB WD RED in it. It should be fast enough on USB 3. Problem is that if the harddrive crashes you lose all your media.
On the other hand, if you can solve the speed issue with your QNAP, you might be able to upgrade the disks with 4 or 8 TB, giving you plenty of space while keeping the security of RAID.

I have some experience with media on NAS (not Qnap) and have no speed issues. Are you using a wireless connection on your NUC or wired?

I'm connected to my NAS with wired ethernet. HD video plays back fine, but my hi-res audio does stop and start from time to time and this is really bothersome. I use Kodi primarily for hi-res and surround audio playback.

The QNAP model I have supports 4TB drives max, so upgrading 4 drives will cost about $520 and give me 12TB in RAID 5. On the other hand, ditching the NAS and getting two external 10TB USB 3.0 drives will cost more. But if I can get rock-solid audio playback with USB 3.0 it would be worth it.

Maybe I can do some testing with a small external USB drive to see if the performance is better than NAS before making a decision.