My current storage server holds local media + mythtv dvr backend storage. I currently am running 3 media centers off of it. I'm a bit worried about my I/O limits. I'd like to add 2 more media centers to this setup. I just don't know how to test or even if I need to worry about overloading the I/O of the drives assuming all 5 media centers are going at once. I'm using regular hdds with mergerfs. Snapraid provides my fallback.

Should I even be worrying? Do I need to upgrade to an active raid / zfs to keep up with potential reads / writes?

There is always some bottleneck on these deals.
Easy may be to start with some program such as top command or a system monitor gui for clues.

Media used has to be considered as well as any transcoding. 4K media transcoded on the fly may take a huge amount of processing as well as disk access and network.


In any case you need to see ways to monitor resources.

i think stream is the wrong word. they are just nfs shares to kodi around the house. modest quality dvd rips, 1gb or so on average. The highest reads and writes would be the mythtv backend. i'll do some monitoring of a single box and see how it looks, then just multiply i suppose.