Hi,
My movies are all stored on an external hard drive. Files are found are shown in Plex but when trying to start a movies, it just loads and loads and loads without never starting. When trying the same with files directly I. The internal drive, it works fine. Not sue the drive is a 3.0 but it is plugged in a 3.0 port. Everything I find in the internet says that you can store files on an external hdd. What am I doing wrong??
Please help
Can you verify the external HDD is connected, active and still mounted to the same drive letter?
Some external HDDs will go to sleep rather quickly based on their firmware config or your Windows power settings… waking the HDD and spinning it up can take some time
That is why I turn off all “sleep” or spin down functions of all external drives. I have 13 external drives connected to my server and I have never lost any info.
I also do not ever allow my server to sleep. The power saved by sleeping a computer is quite minimal and the hassles that sleeping can cause often takes quite a bit of time to fix.
For me the only disadvantage to external drives is that I once exceeded the number of USB drives allowed by the operating system. That causes random drives to be dropped from time to time. That number is total USB devices and any USB device can contribute to the buss overload. It is well to remember that sometimes you can connect a USB device and everything seems fins and then later a device kicks in and the number is exceeded and one of the USB devices will go poof. If that happens to be a drive that drive will be completely disconnected and will not reconnect until the connection gets reset.
USB drives work with Plex very very well but you do need to be aware of the total number of devices connected.
BTW: If you are unable to find a way to prevent the drive from shutting down there are utilities available that keep drives awake. They range fro programs that periodically send “Wake up” to the drive to others that take the simple action of every few minutes writing a file to the drive and then deleting it.
One more thing: Some USB hubs, both powered and unpowered, intermittently disconnect random devices for no apparent reason. Unfortunatly the only way I have found to find hubs that don’t do that is to test. Powered hubs are lees likely to have problems than unpowered ones.
I’ve made several tests and no it is no sleeping… My library loads and appears. It just never starts when I try to play a movie.
Nice explanations. Thx
I only have one drive directly connected to computer.
Can you please describe how to turn off or prevent a specific drive (in that case, my external HDD) from going into sleep mode?
Thank you
All you need to do is search the internet for “Prevent external hard drive from sleeping” and in the results will be several links with all the explanations you are likely to need.
I “think” most of what you need is in the “power” part of your computer settings. To get there I do not use the new “settings” that Windows has but rather I load the old “Control Panel” but since I have have always kept the control panel on my home screen I do not know how to find the settings needed through the regular Windows settings.
That is about as helpful as I can be. I hope it is enough.
One more thing: I use StableBit’s DrivePool to pool all my drives and it may have some features that aid in the sleep issue but I set it up so long ago that I do not know if it helps or not.
DrivePool is wonderful software and makes using multiple external drives very easy. It is even easy to replace or upgrade the drives without losing anything. It, and server software like Plex, are the best software purchases I have ever made.
Thank you
Will definitely give it a try!
I use drivepool with windows and 5 ex-usb drives never had a problem
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