Server Version#: 4.53.0
Player Version#: LG OLED Client ver. 5.11.1
As the title says, Plex will keep spinning up my external harddrive and shutting it down, about 3 times a minute. This causes issues with the Plex interface not responding, the fast forward just freezing up for a while, buffering issues and it’s just really annoying to listen to.
I just updated the app on my TV and I’m no longer able to revert to the old Plex app where this was less of a problem for some reason. I can no longer scroll through the list of my movies without it having to take a break of 20 seconds halfway through.
My server is a 2014 i5 Mac mini, 4GB RAM and a 500GB SSD. It has a 10TB Western Digital external harddrive connected via USB 3.0. I have tried disabling all HDD sleep functions in macOS and even the supported WD app where you can adjust these settings too, but nothing helps.
The drive behaves as you would expect when I transfer files to it, it’s only Plex that makes it behave this way.
Can Plex force the HDD to keep spinning while the client app is running? I cannot imagine it’s very good for the drive to spin up and down so much.
This is probably built into the external HDD controllers firmware. An external HDD isn’t really meant for something like this. Best to install the HDD in the computer.
I have no idea, but the first thing I would do is to disable all Sleep/Power Saving/Spindown features.
You’re right, drives that spin up and down constantly may have more wear than those that never spindown. Drives are made to spin - 24/7. I have a few that have been spinning for a decade - they’re first on the replacement list, but show no signs of failure (not that they ever would).
Here’s something for discussion:
I’ve heard that drives will spindown when idle. If my drives are spinning down - I can’t tell - they come back almost instantly at any rate.
I’ve also heard that as long as Power Saving isn’t actually powering down the drives - they’ll handle their own spin down/up and you’ll never be the wiser.
I have no idea if any of that is real or true - I just know that all my stuff is awake and ready to perform all day, all night, and on holidays.
The only thing that causes sleep is a power outage.
I just made sure to disable Sleep on the WD My Book and the “Put hard disks to sleep when possible” option on the Mac. The drive still spins up and down at the same interval.
The new plex dashboard for some reason absolutely hates this and is now so slow that it’s borderline unusable.
I’m running macOS Mojave, where Files and Folders isn’t an option in Security & Privacy. Plex has no issues seeing the harddrive and its content, it’s just that it keeps spinning up and down when playing and browsing the library.
Time Machine is disabled for my external drives
I’ll try disabling spotlight on the drive by adding it to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations.
on windows, there is a western digital provided app that you can use to set or disable disk spin down.
usually, it is also included on the disk itself as part of the WD backup or utilities software.
I don’t know if there is a mac equivalent available, but if you have access to a windows machine or laptop, you could set the drive time out there and it may help resolve your issue.
as far as plex, I’m sure it is just reading the disk from the os, and the os will cache/buffer ahead however much it is able before having to reach back out for a new read and/or write.
plex doesn’t really know or care if the disk is internal or external.
I have used that WD software to disable sleep on the drive.
Someone in your link suggested resetting SMC on the Mac, that has solved a lot of things in the past so it may be worth trying. This is a headless Mac with no keyboard attached so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
I also have an iMac I could try this external drive on. Can I copy the Plex library and settings from my Mac mini to my iMac so I quickly can test this?
if you wanted to copy your existing library and ‘split’ it into a separate server, you just skip the part about ‘preferences’. (the server name and unique ID are stored in the preferences)
I just want to test the iMac to figure out where the problem lies. Using the iMac as server is not really an ideal solution as I don’t want to turn it on just for Plex. The Mac mini is running 24/7 for various purposes.
As for Reset SMC, it’s very simple process but don’t forget to dismount your Storage volumes and dis conconnect. To add, on my main storage USB Volume I use a Thunderbolt to USB3 cable as Mac’s have had intermittent issues with USB External Volumes over time. (Just a thought if not using that port).
Thank you for that link. While not exactly the same problem I think it might have led me to figure out the solution myself. While reading through his blog post I got suspicious of Time Machine like SE56 also mentioned earlier.
I use TimeMachineEditor to manage backups. As this is just a dumb Plex and file server I have no use for hourly backups, so instead I configured it to do a weekly backup instead. This should have worked fine but looking at it’s advanced settings I saw the “Don’t backup when an app prevents system sleep”. I checked that and that might have solved the issue. Not sure why because Time Machine wasn’t allowed to backup at this time.
I have now made further changes to TimeMachineEditor to make sure it backs up at the exact time I want it to. Should Plex streaming happen to prevent backup for a week so be it. Nothing important is changing that rapidly anyway.
I will test for a few days and let you know if it worked or not. I have tried restarting the Mac mini several times now and the fix does seem to stick. I have also re-enabled sleep on the WD drive to 10min because I don’t want it running 24/7, I just want it to run uninterrupted while streaming videos
