I was thinking it would be nice if the new dashboard would show you the various drives you have set up as libraries and the amount of space they have left. Even better if it turned yellow or red if the free space got below a certain point. Even better than that if it showed you what upcoming recordings were destined for that drive.
What I would ultimately love is for Plex to support drive pooling where I could set a show to record to the pool and Plex would just select the drive in that pool that has the most space available so I don’t have to worry about it nor spend time thinking about where something is set up to record. Yes, I know I could buy a big hard drive and resolve the problem for a while but it’s disappointing when a show fails to record when there was a perfectly fine drive that it could have been recording to.
Not able to tell if that was an intentionally snarky response or maybe you guessed incorrectly that I don’t know how to use computers.
I know I can look at the drive’s properties, I’m more interested in whether or not Plex surfaces the information in a more accessible way. I come from a long background on Beyond TV where the UI that lists the recorded shows tells you how much drive space you have available right at the top. I was hoping that Plex would make it easy to keep track of as well and maybe I had just missed it. It’s a rather important bit of information for anyone using the DVR features, especially since Plex doesn’t have drive pooling.
I am pretty new to Plex and I had not noticed that they had a feature suggestion area where I could vote. I just went and cast most of my votes for various features. I didn’t see an existing feature request for the ability to pool drives together but I’ll do more searching before I create a new feature request because I figure someone must have already suggested it.
This sort of thing is better left to software which is built for this purpose, IMHO.
Like use a pool on your storage server or NAS (RAID, ZFS etc)
or install the DrivePool software onto your Windows machine.
Give me a minute while I reassemble my skull after having my brain explode…
I have never heard of DrivePool, that is a very cool piece of software. Reading about it I agree, it would let me do what I want to do.
I’m going to have to explore what is possible because the usefulness of DrivePool in my life will likely extend beyond Plex. Thank you so much for telling me about it.
FYI, I have used RAID in the past for my media storage. It was great until the whole array failed for no apparent reason and I couldn’t use standard data recovery software to fix it due to the proprietary nature of how the array set up the drives. It wasn’t worth spending $1000 to pay someone to recover it so I just lost all my media. Since then I’ve run those same drives for years as a JBOD so if something fails they are at least formatted in a way that data recovery software understands. (Granted, there is likely software that could have rebuilt the array but back then it was very expensive because those companies assume a RAID array means corporate money is available.) FYI, my enclosure is a CineRAID and this is the second time I’ve had trouble with it so I’m planning to ditch it while wishing I had paid for a Synology array years ago instead since my Synology array at work has been great.
Well Drivepool offers a free 30 day trial.
I have been using it far longer than Plex so I agree it definitely has it’s uses outside of Plex.
It can also be as simple or intricate as your needs require. It’s also pretty cool that you can take any pooled drive out of a system and read the contents on any other windows machine. Even if Drivepool isn’t installed on that PC.
Oh and Chrisopher( Alias Drashna) who is the tech support guy is really helpful.
Parity although not part of DP itself can also be achieved ( if required) by running Flexraid or Snapraid alongside Drivepool.
If you have any questions please feel free to PM me…or like I said head over to the forums where Drashna will be happy to help.
Oh, so DrivePool doesn’t write it in proprietary format. That was one of the things I wanted to research. I was hoping I could do what you describe if something went wrong. How does DrivePool handle drives disappearing. For instance, if an external drive was part of the pool and you disconnect the drive on rare occasions. I’m not really planning to make my portable external part of the pool but I’m curious what it would be like if I did.
One of the nice things about Beyond TV that I haven’t tested with Plex is that it would typically handle things well if you used a portable drive for media. I could tell Beyond TV that I store video on my flash drive and when I plugged the drive in I just had to wait a minute or two for Beyond TV to notice and then all my media would show up. Since I had a DVR at my parents’ house and at my house it was handy for recording things there but watching them at home. Obviously Plex has that functionality covered much better with streaming.
As far as I know it used the put the remainder if that pool into read only mode ( but still usable by Plex)
I’m pretty sure that is no longer the case and though it will always prompt a drive is missing the remainder will maintain full read/write capability. BUT… don’t quote me on that.
I’m a sucker for organisation and have several pools running.
Movies on one pool.
Shows on another.
Archived shows from yesteryear on another.
And so on…
But like I said the complexities are only there if you want to use them.
I’ll do some testing. With a 30 day trial that’s plenty of time to make sure I can fit it into my system and it’s not overly expensive to buy either.
I’ll have to decide if I want to use DrivePool to duplicate movies/shows I don’t want to risk losing or if I use Minio and an S3 sync tool to duplicate it between systems. I currently run Minio on my Plex server because I backup my main computer to the array using Duplicati and Minio. It would be pretty easy to set up a sync between the two systems to do something similar since I’m likely to quit using the CineRAID array entirely since I don’t trust it anymore. I see that StableBit has CloudDrive which might be able to directly talk to Minio, as long as they let me set the URL rather than hardcoding the URL for AWS S3.
Yeah i must admit I havent realy done much with Cloud drive.
All my media is already mirrored to Google Drive unlimited account. So never really needed to look at Cloud drive too much.
