Returning to @rbienstock’s original question, I think the answer on the Encore side is pretty straightforward — add an additional server when more capacity is needed. Obviously you could also upgrade to a larger server, but as already noted, is kind of an expensive proposition.
On the Premiere side, I would take the caution from support seriously. Doing a RAID rebuild is stressful on the disk set, and if you need to replace three drives, that’s a lot of rebuilding. I can think of three options to gain space, in no particular order:
- Add another Premiere server.
- Replace the 3U with a 1U+ with 30TB drives. That will get you 90TB of storage, which it sounds like is more than enough for your foreseeable needs. You’ll gain 2RU of rack space, and save quite a bit on power consumption. You also get a new warranty.
- Purchase a 3U disk set with six or seven 12TB drives, and borrow a 3U chassis from a dealer. Replicate your content onto the new disk set using the borrowed chassis, then move that set into your 3U chassis. That will give you brand-new drives with a warranty, and room to grow as needed. If you buy six drives rather than seven, you’d end up with the same storage that you have now. If you’re Adding Encore storage as well, then you could save the Premiere storage exclusively for imported discs and download the Store movies currently on your Premiere onto your Encore system. If you buy seven drives, then you’d gain 12TB of storage so you could keep all the movies you have downloaded on the server now, have plenty of space for future imports, plus you’d have plenty of room in the chassis to expand storage in the future if needed.
Of these options, I recently did the second one — I replaced my 3U with a 1U+ and replicated the content over.
