I was reading stuff about Cache drives, which is able to give a positive boost to your system / experience. It got my attention but I do have some questions. I hope you can help me with them, thanks!
Is it just having a more smooth experience when browsing your library or do cache drives give you other benefits?
What’s best practice? Using OS and Cache on the same drive or is it recommended to separate them?
What kind of hardware is recommended when it comes to cache drive, m.2. NVMe drive or SATA SSD? Or is there no noticeable difference?
Is there some kind of rule when it comes to all your media files ( library ) and how big your Cache drive must be?
So this is more of a do as I say, not as I do kinda conversation I am not currently virtualized but am going to in the near future, so some of this is up to how your current configuration is…
Ideally run your OS on a different volume than your temp drive. Depending on your scale… If you are sharing with a couple people, who cares. But if you are sharing with a bunch of people, that is when all the optimizations come into play. I would say 1-5 people, who cares. 6-10, be particular and 11+ best practices time.
Depending on what you mean by “cache” is also important… If you are talking just transcoding, setup a ramdisk. If you are talking about a container or VM caching means something different and how to would set it up is different. But in my experience, Plex library scanning isn’t that taxing so focus more on your transcoding and OS performance with caching. All that said, don’t store your library, OS and temp folder all on 1 disk (unless you have a array that supports lots of read and write, but still… Just don’t )
To me, a cache volume shouldn’t store anything long term, so get enough RAM and create a disk out of it at boot and configure Plex to point there for that content (transcodes most likey). But for your OS always use a SSD. M2 is best of breed right now, so that is a great plan… But remember, SSDs are more expensive, so to stop want your library on a spinning disk (or multiple)
Hope this helped, it kinda all over the place. I know
I have a 128GB SATA SSD and I was thinking to use it as the OS drive and get a new 256GB NVMe disk for caching ( transcode ). Or should you advice me to do something else? Side note I’m not using the system with many people. It probably will run 3-4 simultaneous transcodes / streams.
With that few streams running, I wouldn’t be too concerned.
But, if it were me… Run the NVMe drive as the OS and install Plex to that drive. NVMe drives get/give more throughout (since they are directly on the PC bus) and for transcoding/temp volumes a SATA SSD would be able enough throughout. You also likey won’t need 128gb of space for that few steamers.
But like I said I’m my larger note… If you can, look into creating a Ramdisk for the temp/transcodes volume… ram doesn’t have the write limitations SSD and NVME drives have…
I am not currently virtualized but am going to in the near future, so some of this is up to how your current configuration is…
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