Plex not seeing media on different storage pool

[jarboej]

Server Version#: 1.31.0.6654
Player Version#:4.87.2

I have a Synology DS920+ and just created an NVME storage pool(storage pool 2/volume 2 on my NAS) and migrated Docker over to this pool to help speed up some things with Plex. However, after setting Plex up it now says all my media is unavailable. My media is in my videos folder on storage pool 1/ volume 1. When I set up Docker I did assign /videos mapped to /videos but in Plex now if if go to manage library I see /videos but none of the subfolders. I’ve ensured that the PGID and PUID are set correctly as my user and administrators groups.

[ChuckPa]

Question:

Why are you using Docker? You don’t need to on Synology

1. You can install PMS (in package center) on a specific volume

2. You can move the PlexMediaServer shared folder (which is what really matters) to Volume 2 via (Control Panel - Shared folder)

3. You then set permission for PlexMediaServer to access the media

– This is the typical issue folks have with Synology

Synology FAQ - Questions, Answers, and How-To's

FAQ 29 - DSM 7 - Give PlexMediaServer access to your media When you migrate to DSM 7, are installing a server for the first time, or just adding a new shared folder / sub-folder for media , folks forget to read the popup at the end of every installation which tells them about how to set permissions. This FAQ shows in detail how to do what those instructions state. When might you need to perform these steps? When upgrading, changing permissions from Plex to PlexMediaServer is overlook…

[jarboej]

1. My understanding was that the docker version runs cleaner than the PMS version. Also when I first started out with Plex the official synology release was broken so it was what I was using already before setting up the NVME pool.
2. I can’t move this to the NVME pool as the size of my media database is much larger than the size of the NVME pool. The reason for even wanting to put plex on this pool is that my understanding is it will speed up the load times of displaying artwork, and things Plex pulls from the web since the NVME read/write is faster than the platter drives.
3. I don’t have that group available to set permissions for, so I’ve used the PGID and PUID in docker with the administrators group and my user ID which is also an admin that has read/write access to the /videos folder

[ChuckPa]

1. The package’s binaries and the docker’s binaries are the same. The only difference is how it’s packaged (docker versus spk)

2. How big is your PlexMediaServer shared folder . NVME drives can come in some pretty big sizes plus there’s probably a fail amount of “Junk” you can clean out of your existing Plex metadata directories (just collects over time). Also, if the databases themselves have gotten unruly, we can fix that too and shrink them down to what they should be.

3. Permissions / UID-GID in containers can easily be mapped. Obtaining the UID/GID used by PlexMediaServer is listed in the Syno FAQ if you want to go that route.

If I may ask?

1. How much data (media) do you have ? TB ?

2. How big is the PlexMediaServer shared folder ?

3. How big is your NVME volume? What’s the SSD size ? Is it RAID or JBOD ?

[jarboej]

1. This is good to know maybe I should look into this versus docker then.
2. My /videos folder that contains movies, tv shows, and separate kids stuff is 21tb.
3. I’ve mapped this in docker as correctly as I’ve seen it described, I’m found this via sshing into it and finding my UID and GID for administrators

1.1) 21tb
2.1) I believe this is the same number as 1.1? I only have the one folder on volume 1 and plex historically read each subfolder to populate the respective categories in Plex (movies, tv shows, kids)
3.1)NVME is only 2TB in raid 1

[ChuckPa]

The amount of media you have, which you’ve indexed into Plex, will always be greater than the size of PlexMediaServer itself (unless something has gone horribly wrong)

Things that could go wrong:

1. You put media files in a folder somewhere under “PlexMediaServer”
2. PMS it grossly misbehaving.

I have 51TB of media indexed.
PlexMediaServer is, with all my development work included, 200 GB

200GB easily will fit on your NVME SSD. That’s what matters.

Your media can remain out on the main volume where it is.
(it’s actually better out on the main because it will never need SSD speeds)

[jarboej]

Thank you for all your information on this! In Docker it was a bit hard to find the PMS folder but it appears to only have around 3gb. So an interesting discovery with your suggestions. I stopped the docker container and installed PMS via the official package on the NVME pool, granted the user access to my videos folder and then set up Plex accordingly. It created a whole new ‘Plex’ server but can now see my media. The interesting difference between the two is that this version can actually see Volume 1 and Volume 2 when utilizing the manage library functionality. The Docker version never saw any difference between the two and I never saw a way when mapping the folders in Docker to be able to specify volume 1/2. It just sees it as ‘NAS’ with the Videos directory under it.