I am trying to determine how much space I should reserve for my Plex Media Server data directory, the one described in this support article:
The article is interesting and yet not very useful for planning.
For example, I (and my family) really like the preview thumbnails when trying to find a spot in a show, but the article provides no information about how much space they take up. Some kinda of estimated size per hour (or some other unit) of video would help.
Something like a best-typical-worst case set of sizes for the all of the data Plex stores about a movie, TV show, song, album, etc. so that we could do some math to decide a reasonable amount of space to reserve for Plex to grow into.
Given the numbers of media files I’ve seen thrown about in this forum (and others), I had thought my system was about average or below, but my Plex Media Server data directory is over 375 GB and, given that it is on a 500 GB drive, I am understandably concerned about continued growth.
If there any way to estimate/plan for the size/growth of the Plex Media Server data directory?
You can estimate about 30 MB per video hour. For preview thumbnails alone.
The rest of the Plex metadata comes on top of that.
So it all comes down to: how big is your library and what is the media mix in it?
For a bigger server, I’d go with at least a 500GB SSD for the data folder. Nowadays it may be actually smarter to get a 1TB SSD instead to allow room for growth.
FWIW, I found some sqlite queries that allowed me to get a nice spreadsheet that shows the total duration of the media from my various libraries at
Using the 30MB per video hour estimate resulted in just over 800GB of storage required for the the preview thumbnails alone. I don’t remember ever turning the thumbnails off for anything, but the actual size is around 380GB for the ENTIRE Plex data directory – including the thumbnails and everything else.
So I am curious about the 30MB/hr estimated size… is that a sort of ‘worst case’ estimate? And please be aware, I am absolutely NOT complaining here, I am genuinely curious and wondering if I may have configured something differently than I expect somewhere.
It is difficult to make an estimate. The thumbnails are a series of snapshots in jpeg. And the filesize of a jpeg (given identical pixel dimensions) varies greatly, depending on the actual content of the image.
So it might have been that my 30 MB were a bit on the pessimistic side when you average it out over a big library.
