I purchased a 10 TB external USB as storage for my Media Server. I noticed after moving the data to the drive the server took a while to begin playing any media running on it. Basically everytime you play an item for the first time after some delay, it takes some 10-20 seconds before the item begins playing.
I have subsequently found out the drive is known for this behavior and it simply takes a long time to wake from sleep. Indeed this behavior is even in Windows when simply navigating to the device. If possible, it would be nice to have Plex reach out to the media device when accessing a library to force the wake up before media is actually requested.
In my case all libraries are configured from one device. In the case of a library spanning multiple volumes, simply send a wake request on all of them.
The hard drive is a Western Digital make model WDBCKA0100HBK. I don’t want to burn through the hard drive keeping it idle all the time. I probably use the media 3 times a week. This leaves a significant amount of time where keeping it idle is a waste of life/energy. Even still, I did try to disable the internal Windows option for selective USB power down but it didn’t seem to have an effect.
To be clear, after the hard drive is back “online” so to speak I have no issues with the file playing operation. It works quickly. I’m not aware if there is any feature internal to the external drive that could help me here.
You sir are on top of things. Before coming back to this post I had already downloaded and installed that software. Indeed they have an option to turn off the sleep mode for the drive. While this does effectively solve the problem related to the massive delay in initializing the hard drive, it does introduce a new problem of power usage/drive wear by keeping the hard drive on 24/7.
The suggestion is to introduce a quick file operation to begin hard drive initialization to get the best of both worlds. Then the hard drive is only available when there is potential for streaming.
As far as cost is concerned you are probably looking and pennies a year between always running and not. As far as wear although some argue that constant running creates more wear but in my experience spin up and down is what causes more issues.
Its like a car the more you start and stop it the higher the chance your starter will go out so the less you start and stop it the better. If the starter blows on your drive its dead so keeping it running in my opinion is a better option.
These are my drives uptime and I do not spin them down 7y, 7m, 15d, 3h
A typical large capacity hard-drive left running 24/7 in UK prices is costing around £25.00 a year in electricity, that isn’t insignificant.
Also hard-drives tend to just last a long time unless unlucky, I’ve got drives over 10 years old and still working fine and they have only ever been started and stopped. The hard-drive in the PVR is over 10 years old and that starts and stops constantly throughout the day every day, still going strong.
Yes you wouldn’t a hard-drive spinning up and down every few minutes, that’s not doing it any good, but for one used a few times a day it isn’t going to do any harm at all.
Laptop drives are a good alternative for media, they are designed for start/stop use anyway, are often quieter and use less power, and will spin up pretty quickly.
