I have an elderly Asustor AS608T NAS, with all 8 drive bays filled, running as my main Plex server. It has been in operation since early 2014. The processor is a dual core Atom and it only has 1GB of RAM, so it’s a bit underpowered. But it does a pretty good job provided it isn’t asked to transcode much, and I have relatively decent clients and mostly optimised media so transcoding isn’t really an issue. Budget constraints (new house, new baby) mean that it can’t be replaced with a better specced server for a while, so barring catastrophes it will have to soldier on for another 2-3 years.
When I set it up it was pretty zippy. However, it is now getting very slow to load up metadata and navigate. I don’t know whether this is due to PMS upgrades or library growth, but with about 7,500 films and 28,000 TV episodes I suspect it’s the size of the database that it causing this. If I could address this then the user experience would be much better.
I have read that the best way to improve database/metadata performance is to add an SSD. Given that the drive bays are all full, this would have to be added externally. Luckily the NAS has a decent range of external connectors (USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and eSATA). So I was thinking of attaching a 500GB SSD to an external connector, and using it to store Plex metadata.
Given that replacing the NAS isn’t currently an option, I’m looking for some help and comments from the Gurus here on:
- whether adding an SSD would be likely to markedly improve the speed at which Plex loads metadata;
- is it possible to attach an SSD to the NAS using the eSATA connector, and have it appear as a separate drive to store the metadata;
- if so, how would I move the existing metadata, and tell Plex to store/access metadata off the SSD; and
- is this the only/best option to inexpensively improve performance (eg would more RAM make more/much of a difference).
Thanks
