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Safe to try without harming my disks?


road hazard

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I have an ASRock H97 Pro4 motherboard with an i5 4690K cpu stuffed with some hard drives. Was thinking about getting a Synology but the price for the enclosure is insane which lead me to XPEnology. Is it possible for me to put XPEnology on a USB drive and just make sure it works with my motherboard without harming my existing RAID 1 arrays on my motherboard. (Sort of like just taking it out for a test drive? Or should I disconnect my SATA drives first?)

 

Also, is the Plex Media Server free with XPEnology? How are Plex Media Server updates handled regarding XPEnology? Can I update as soon as PMS has a new version out in the Synology app store or must I wait for somebody to convert updates into a XPEnology package?

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DSM needs to be installed to one or more HDDs, so I would disconnect your existing drives and plug in a spare HDD or two.

 

PMS is free, although you get more features with a Plexpass.

 

Plex notifies you that an upgrade is available via a banner on the web page of the app. You have to click on the link to the Plex website, download the .spk file and then manually install the package on the DSM package manager app - it usually takes me less than 5 minutes in total.

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@berwhale is right, disconnect your drives and use a spare

you will need to disable the onboard raid1 and set sata to ide mode, you might also need to test all 6 sata ports that I think the mobo has, as sometimes XPE drivers only sees 4 of them

I would go through the full setup process and install DSM, create a volume and check features before you decide. If you do decide to go to XPE/DSM then you will need to backup your data, create new SHR raid etc

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