My plex data storage is approaching 4Tb on an internal SSD card. As I don’t think there are bigger SSD cards yet, and standard HD drives are not recommended for plex data storage, what would you advise? Thank you
You can get 8, 16 and even up to 64 TB of SSD storage (though, those are getting expensive).
Just to clarify… are we talking about the server data directory (database, metadata…), or your media?
I’ve been using standard external HD storage on three different Plex servers for years now without issue.
Only the data, Not the media. Are these SSD cards can be used on a PC slot ? If not, isn’t there a performance problem?
do you have video thumbnails enabled? they can take up A LOT of storage if you have a large library.
Yes thumbnails are enabled but they are very useful.
I’d check if you are affected by the DB bloat issue. It cannot hurt to try and run the DB bloat issue fix, followed by repairing the database using this bat file: DBRepair/Windows at master · ChuckPa/DBRepair · GitHub
As an immediate measure, stop Plex server, then enter the plex data folder,
dive into the subfolder \Plex Media Server\Cache\PhotoTranscoder,
and empty it out.
This may provide some wiggle room to perform the above repairs.
well I suppose the first step is determining what exact folders/subfolders are using the space.
in linux, you can use such commands as du -hsc /pathtoplexdata/* to find the root folders with the most used space, and then start narrowing it down.
it is most likely the video thumbnails and or databases, all entirely dependent on your media collection size.
Sorry but why go through all this. There is nothing needing repairing. It is a huge library: approaching 200 Tb.
Not a mystery I am afraid: almost a 200 Tb library.
I have a similar large system, if you don’t wish to disable video thumbs to lower the storage requirements, then really your likely options are to move to newer enterprise hardware which supports larger nvme/u2 ssds, which get progressively more expensive but are available in larger sizes.
you could also consider something like raid10 with smaller sized ssds, a 6 or 8 device raid10 with 2tb drives would get you over your current 4tb needs with some room to grow.
also at these library sizes, single core cpu performance can become a bottleneck due to sqlite, so the better the single core speed, the better the library responsiveness.
I was afraid to get this kind of answer!
For now I have a very insecure hardware configuration (a recent pc with 12 big external HD) with no remote connection outside our home (I don’t wish to change that) on an Ethernet network. But it works fine for now
I’d wish to get a more reliable solution (with some redundancy) but I haven’t found yet a comprehensive guide online to do that on budget
My computing knowledge is limited (some very ancient programming notions).
This « cinémathèque » is just a hobby for a retired movie buff with a limited budget - if I don’t want to be strangled by my wife!
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- Theoretical option: You could containerize your installation and separate the database from the metadata, or map different parts into separate Docker volumes.
- RAID option: This could be your lifesaver and is relatively easy to set up. Most motherboards support it.
- Metadata size concern: A 200 TB collection seems small to require 4 TB of metadata. You might have a lot of unused or leftover data (just a guess). I’m not sure if there’s a Plex cleaner tool that removes obsolete metadata, but the “thermonuclear” approach would be to back everything up and restart Plex from scratch. It would take time, but you’d end up with a clean setup.
I’d recommend moving to an Unraid setup if you’re technical enough, though it will be a significant undertaking. The benefit is that it would give you greater peace of mind. (This is related your insecure hardware, and the risk of loosing data)
Have you considered tweaking how often they are generated? You can reduce the number of thumbnails by a good margin and save a lot of space.
I replaced my 4TB with a new 8TB during this year’s Prime Days - funny enough, Amazon’s WD 8TB drive’s still hovering around the same price - for now…
I now have my 8TB (still just shy of 4TB Plex App data) backing up to two 4TB SSDs as drive J: using (Stablebit) DrivePool and SyncFolders.
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