I did a search for this and only found one thread that has asked the same question and there was no response.
Pretty basic really, when plex scans my mkv file that has all the chapters set, it creates a thumbnail for it. Where is this thumbnail stored on windows?
I ask because it does seem that chapter thumbnails are being stored on my C drive. I would like to move them to my D drive. I know this is possible because I have already moved the preview thumbnails that get generate by plex from my C drive to my D drive.
I will give this a try when I get the chance. I was kind of thinking the same thing but was not sure if it should be done. At a certain point I was just going to link the whole plex server folder located in the appdata location in windows to my D drive. What was the worst thing that was going to happen?
I’m assuming you have a spinning drive for your D:\ drive correct? Your Plex Data folder has a bunch of small files that are accessed quickly, so you don’t want that on a spinning disk, it makes a significant difference.
Now if’n you want to to move just the chapter thumbnails then it would only slow down the loading of those thumbnails, but since those are the things you probably most want to load quickly that might not be great either. I personally disable chapter thumbnails because they take significantly large amounts of space. Your other option would be to get a 2nd SSD to use for them. You can get a cheap 120GB SSD for like $20. If you get a cheap one I’d suggest one of the following
Move just the thumbnails there, but I can’t tell you which folder they are in since I don’t use them. If they are just mixed with all the other metadata files this won’t be an option.
Make sure you backup your Plex Data folder regularly to your spinning drive because the cheap ones are much more likely to fail with lots of reads/writes.
I’d also suggest looking into a RAMdisk for your transcode folder or putting it on your slower spinning drive if you don’t transcode much, because the transcoding will wear out cheap drives. (Note: you don’t have to buy anything, you just set aside 6GBs of RAM that the system thinks is a drive. It’s super fast & Plex does not use much RAM in general so if you have 16GB+ it should be doable)
Thank you for your reply. Really appreciate that you took the time to respond.
I personally like keeping my C:\ drive just for windows. So, I am looking just to put everything on my D:\ and keep the C:\ free an clear.
As for my system. I don’t generally get anything cheap for any of my systems. I have been fortunate enough in life to be able to do that. My D:\ drive is actually an SSD. Samsung 840 pro 128GB. I keep all my media on a Western Digital Red Pro drive. I have 2 4TB drive set in a raid 1. (Yes, it is pretty small compared to some here).
So in terms of performance, I shouldn’t really see a hit. When I start doing 4K transcode, I was already thinking of setting aside about 6GB of ram, as you suggested. For my system would be minimal as I have 32GB total.
