I was wondering if I were to run 2 Plex servers could they both access the same network tuners or would there be potential conflicts?
My specific PMS setup now is a Shield TV Pro 2015 with SSD internal and 2 HDHR connects (4 tuners total) and a 2TB USB harddrive.
The problem that I have is that one night a week I record 3 shows at the same time and my PMS seems to slow down. Commercial skip is turned off. I’m thinking that I could use my second Shield TV , (a 16GB 2017 model) to record 1 or 2 of those shows to spread out the load.
It might be worth giving it a shot by setting up PMS on your second shield… My current view is, that Plex assumes all (!) tuners of an assigned device ( no matter if HDHR or others) are solely to be occupied by Plex itself.
… So … you might run into clashes.
To your point of PMS slowing down - is this maybe an I/O issue? I am not familiar with the Shield hardware (using a QNAP NAS for Plex and such), but is this USB 3.0 or, network related, is there enough bandwith to record 3 streams simultaneously ?!
For me, Germany with DVB-C, recording 3 HD channels at 1080p full HD with average bitrate eats up 5-10 MBit per stream. That works fine via ethernet - but not on WiFi. So adding another “consumer” via WiFi would not solve anything …
The harddrive is USB 3.0 and none of the devices are using wifi (100mb or 1000mb ethernet). I possibly should have spent more on the HDHRs and bought "Extend"s instead of "Connect"s.
You could delete one of the hdhomerun devices off your current shield and then add that one to the new setup, that way you would have two tuners on each shield and that would not conflict with each other.
I have a non-Plex DVR Media setup that uses an HDHomeRun Prime (3x cablecard tuners) and two HDHomeRun Dual units (older white model with 2x2 ATSC tuners). That is 3 + 4 = 7 tuners plus a Hauppauge HD PVR analog tuner for a total of 8 tuners.
On this system in question, I’ve used USB 3.0 HDD as targets for recording and have had mixed results.
I’ve found that a typical 2.5" USB 3.0 HDD is simply not fast enough to deal with all the recordings at once. Or at least I have seen hitching issues with multiple recordings using a single 2.5" USB 3.0 HDD.
Moving to a WD MyBook Duo USB 3.0 RAID enclosure using two 3.5" HDD (2x 4TB) in RAID 1 deals quite well with all the recordings. In fact, not only does it handle multiple recordings fine but it can even allow for file transfers to and from a server during live TV and multiple recordings without issue.
So if your external 2TB USB HDD is of the slower 2.5" type you might want change to a faster more resilient HDD configuration.
I thought about assigning one of the HDHRs to a new PMS but that doesn’t really work to well for me, I’d rather buy an extra HDHR or just skip one of the recordings. @Octavean might have inspired an idea for me. Currently my Shield has a 500GB SSD for internal storage as well as the 2TB 3.0 USB 2.5" HDD. I had first experienced the slowness on the USB HDD so I moved all of my recordings to the internal 500GB SSD where I’m still experiencing slowness. What I will do is have some of those recordings happen on the USB HDD (all done now - easy change). If I get a chance to watch TV tonight, I’ll let you know if that makes a difference.
Yeah that makes sense. Splitting the recording locations to different locations for high volume hours of recording may well help. Unfortunately you’ll have to manually load balance if this works.
I’ll point out that on many nVidia SoC (Tegra) devices like the Nintendo Switch and nVidia Shield the internal storage “may” not perform as well as one might expect from a traditional SSD. So if you toss a lot of IO at it with multiple recordings it might not work well.
I don’t have an nVidia Shield for testing but even if I were to buy one I probably wouldn’t buy the Pro version. In any case you probably don’t want to do a lot of writes and rewrites to the internal storage either way.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how your experiment goes. Good luck!
