Whilst I’m waiting for the check disk in the RAID array to complete… which is going to take a couple of days, I was interested in what you said about creating a RAM disk. I’ve not come across this before? I have 16GB of RAM, so plenty to use some for this purpose.
OK, so essentially you use an app that steals a chunk of RAM and creates a Hard Drive with it.
I use ImDisk Toolkit…
16GB of RAM is a little light, but you should be able to get a fair sized disk from that.
You need a RAM disk more than large enough to accommodate an entire movie, although this also depends on other factors, such as… Do you share content with others, and if so, how often do you see them transcoding? … If you do share, and often see them transcoding, then you may need a bigger RAM disk.
First place to start for you, would be to monitor your server and see how much RAM it “normally” uses.
If it only tends to use around 4GB to 6GB, then you can afford to steal 8GB to 10GB of RAM to make a disk.
Once you have done that, you then create a new folder called Plex on that RAM drive, and then in the settings in Plex, you point your transcode location, such as this…
Then restart Plex to make sure it has saved the setting, and then the process of transcoding will look more like this…
- Plex starts a transcode.
- The movie is read from the disk storage → DISK READS
- The transcoded chunks are written to the RAM disk → RAM WRITES
- The transcoded chunks that have just been written to the RAM disk are now read into memory whilst they are streamed out via Plex → RAM READS
And so doing it this way is extremely efficient, and only requires READS from your data storage, not multiple READS and WRITES.
EDIT: And importantly, if your Transcode location is currently on the SSD, you will no longer be wearing the SSD.
And if more than one user is using your server concurrently, you need enough to accomodate all these videos together.
Which is getting ridiculously expensive very fast, without much improvement for users.
I think you are better off with an additional “throwaway” SSD.
I simply rerouted the transcoder temp folder to a single, faster “spinning rust” drive and let my OS take care of caching that.
For reference, I have a 16GB RAM disk, and over the last 4 years, I have had occasions where I have had 3 users transcoding and have never used more than 8GB of the RAM disk.
It really is a case of try it and see how it works out.
PMS is monitoring the free space on this storage volume and starts to throw out media “chunks” if free space goes below a certain threshold. So you might just have observed that.
While your users cannot jump back further without the server having to transcode the data from these timestamps again.
Which is what the transcoder cache was intended to prevent. But if it runs into space constraints, it cannot work to its full potential anymore.
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@axemanuk666 16GB is a lot of RAM memory, but when you think of creating drive space, it is pretty small and expensive. I have a second Intel RAID array, so for now I have moved the transcoder temp folder to that RAID controller. I never thought about this before, the impact on the SSD because I had soundbar that supported all audio formats, so there was no need for transcoding. I’m still running Check Disk on the RocketRAID array and still on disk 1. I have updated the RAID array’s BIOS to the latest version as well as the RAID management console, so it has every chance now of finding something bad with one of the drives. I still think this is odd… Normally when I have a drive failure, it flags it to me and a rebuild sorts it out. I’ve had nothing this time and all SMART results are OK. Hopefully it will all become clear once this has ran on all 4 drives. Only 18hrs to go 
One of our customers has a Dell server with a 4 drive RAID5 array in it.
On 2 separate occasions, the server started locking up and freezing, and when this happened, none of the tools could actually see anything strange happening.
The freezing seemed to be random, but over the course of about a week, started getting more and more regular, until eventually the Dell RAID tool finally started to show a failing disk, and when it did, the server stopped stalling and freezing.
It’s like the RAID controller keeps trying to access the bad drive, and is still totally unaware that the drive is going to fail, and then eventually when it does, it isolates the drive and stops trying to access it.
Computers… Drive me feckin’ nuts sometimes!
@axemanuk666 Thank you for your persistence in asking me to check my array again. I definitely had creeping death. One of the 4 drives had damaged sectors. It froze over night when Checking and repairing. So I removed drive 4 and transformers played perfectly fine. no 100% utilisation HDD issues. Before I went ahead to buy another drive, I ran some verify and low level format tools on the disk. unfortunately these tools keep failing as well. So unless you have a recommended tool to resolve this issue, I will have to place an order for a new drive.
@anon18523487 Thank you for your support. I’m glad it wasn’t an entire loss though. Hope you managed to fix the Beta issue with TRUEHD audio?
@Guru_Panda - No worries. Glad the machine is finally starting to behave itself again.
That behavior is almost identical to my customers server. Isolate the bad drive, and the controller starts behaving normally again.
There is nothing that I know of that can save a failing drive, so go ahead and place that order.
I can’t get that sample file. Can you upload to Google Drive or other similar cloud location and send me a link.
However, from the above discussion, sounds like your drive/array may be having issues and corrupting that file.
@anon18523487 You’ll be pleased to know that one of my HDD was failing in my array. I have replaced this drive and my system is fully working again. I was experiencing creeping death… at the beginning, even though tests I ran eliminated the array as the issue, after a period of time had past and running the same tests again, it was apparent that the array with failing. thank you for your support. Did you manage to get the issue resolved in Beta?
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It turns out the issue I was having with TrueHD was due to a setting I had enabled for Windows. It’s their malware protection setting. That was preventing PMS from properly accessing the codecs it needed to transcode the TrueHD. Disabling that got things working for me. Do you still see an issue with TrueHD audio with the new drive?
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I haven’t tried the beta yet, but all is working now the new drive is installed and the HPT Array is looking good again. I did move the transcoder temp folder to my INTEL array, but this started freezing so I moved it back to my SSD drive. Unfortunately there is another drive in the INTEL array which SMART is suggesting a ‘Current Pending Sector Count’ warning. So a drive in my INTEL array is also about to fail. So thats two drives, one from each array that has now failed. It would be nice if these arrays had better reporting features. Thank you for your support.
Good to hear that things are working again.
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