Must hit 'retry' to wake sleeping media drive

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.41.6.9685
Player Version#: any

I am using an Imac to serve plex media stored on a USB drive. The Mac is set not to sleep so it is always available for client connections. When I select something in a client, it will show the info page but when I hit play it always shows an error with a ‘retry’ button. The retry always works. The setting to ‘put hard drives to sleep when possible’ is off but the USB drives must be sleeping anyway. Is there any way to make the server wait a bit longer for the spin-up automatically instead of showing the error and only working on the retry?

2

It most certainly is. “External” hard drives (those which are sold as such) are notorious for ignoring the command to not sleep that the OS is giving.

Prolonging that timeout would also influence many other operations of the server. It is therefore not desirable.

The best solution would be to not use any of those external drives. Go with an external hard drive enclosure and put regular drives into it.

3

Thanks, but I’m finding it very hard to picture any server operations that would be worse than unnecessarily throwing an error on a working drive. Can you elaborate on how waiting for the drive to work properly could be a bad thing? Plex is the only thing with this problem.

4

Yes, please change that timeout to either a longer duration or even better a different style.

On Android TV the error message even occurs before loading the preplay screen.

But it doesn’t make any sense at all that the whole preplay page doesn’t load if the media file is sleeping. EVERYTHING on that preplay page is stored in the Plex Database, so the drive could spinup in the background without problems.

5

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