Hello folks
Had to freshly setup my Server so I bought a Mac Mini M1 since I read on the internet that it would be a great choice. Everything ran smooth so far but suddenly my concern is the caching of Plex, since the built in SSD has 200GB of left disk space at the moment. Does anybody ran into problems with this configuration or are my concerns unfounded?
Thanks for any input on this subject!
If you have not set up some of the more disk intensive options, items like video previews, or chapter thumbnails, There maybe others… otherwise you should be fine, it also depends on how fast your adding items to your server, the more you add, the faster the data grows that consumes space.
Hi Normang
Thanks for your lightning fast answer! From the start I’ve turned off all the disk space consuming features like Video Thumbnail generating, however Plex cache size already consumed 8GB of disk space last time I checked with CleanMyMac X…
With 200GB free and only 8GB in use, if you are all setup with your current libraries and that’s what you’ve used, you’ve got a long ways to go before you swizzle up another 200gb. However, if you have a lot more to a add, then keep on eye on usage, you maybe able to extrapolate how many files you add consumes a certain amount of space, and see how long it may last you…
I clean things up occasionally, remove things I am no longer interested in and archive them elsewhere, and if decide to watch them again, I can reload them.
I have a 2014 Mac Mini with a 250GB SSD and faced Similar Challenges.
Have a look at that link.
@geoffairey Thanks for the link!
As mentioned before I did not activate Video Preview Thumbnails from the beginning. So far so good and I would have taken moving Plex Media Server Data Directory to another drive into consideration BUT as the article suggests it has to be an internal drive. So my question is: How did you solve this since moving to my external RAID seems not the way to go?
Thanks for the great help!
PS: If I take a look with “CleanMyMac”-App I see a folder named “Plex Cache” which I could empty with the app. Ist this reasonable or will Plex refill this folder again? And: Does anybody know if Plex maybe has mechanism for caching, say it will only use a certain amount of space, or will this caching someday flood my System partition?
I have a significant library with more than 600 films, 2400 episodes of TV and more than 25,000 music tracks.
I set Hazel to watch a folder (it may be the Plex Cache folder, but I’m not in front of my mac to look) and delete anything over 7 days old. This folder used to grow well beyond 60GB in size if I didn’t manage it and at one point it filled my boot drive. Even after deleting the contents, it would grow again. Since having Hazel manage it, I’ve not had problems at all.
If I remember later, I’ll check the folder name.
@geoffairey Thanks for the tip regarding hazel. My Lib has about 2500 movies and 165 TV shows so far… In case you sit in front of your mac somehow soon it would be great if you could tell me which folder I have to monitor / empty with hazel… Thanks again for all your inputs & help so far!
PS: It would be great if you could do a quick Screenshot of the according rule in hazel so I can set it up the same here, many thanks!
@geoffairey , you might be accelerating the wear on your SSD drive. what type of files are you deleting? It sounds like you have the thumbnail generator turned on and or other options that generate additional files. I would validate what is generating those files and fix that issue. if youre deleting upwards of 60 GB of files every few weeks you’ll definitely wear that drive out a lot faster that it should.
@Shadowfax-Master , the Plex Cache folder is used to temporarily store transcoded files to be streamed to clients. you can actually assign another drive as the cache drive if you want to reduce wear and tear on your primary drive. I actually use a Ram drive as my cache drive. There are apps that you can download that create a cache drive from extra space on RAM. I’m not familiar with the Mac ecosystem but Im sure there are apps for mac as well
It’s the phototranscoder folder
This must be a Mac-only issue, I have over 2600 movies, a 4K library as well as tons of tv shows and mine is only 6.5 and I’ve never had to clean it. I did a quick web search and there does seem to be an issue with that cache folder on m1 mac’s. Might be worth a topic on the forums.
Thanks for your research on the topic, could you do a post since your already looked into it or should I do? Thanks!
Thanks but isn’t this folder only relevant if you have a photos library?
I’m not sure TBH. Also, with the fact that I don’t have this issue, It wouldn’t bode well for me to open a topic on that issue. I wouldn’t be able to provide logs and details. for you specifically, are you seeing where that folder is very large? If not then don’t worry about it but @geoffairey should post a topic on that issue. The Plex folder will get larger as you add content and as stated earlier, if you’ve disabled the thumbnail stuff then you should be good to go. If your drive available space dips below 100 GB available within the next year and you’re not filling it up with other stuff then definitely post a new thread.
I don’t have any photos in Plex, but it keeps filling up
I now have lost 30GB of Disk space in 3 days and Plex Cache is only 15MB what could that be?
I turned off the thumbnail generator and everything else I could find regarding the use of space on the install drive. it still kept increasing and filled the install drive once to the point where my Mac stopped working. This is the only “fix” I’ve found.
No,
Phototranscoder is a image cache for metadata. Plex clients can request the metadata in specific sizes, it is resized and cached here.
This is why you can delete it with no impact and it just grows back, the images are just resized on the next request and cached again.
It’s size is just related to how many clients are requesting images of different sizes and how many images are being requested. It auto deletes images that haven’t been used in 30 days.
Sorry for my last post, I hope I found the cause now: it seems it was my Backup Software which was running for 3 Days and somehow filled up my drive space. As soon as I quit the app, the disk space grew back to whoopping 197GB… @geoffairey and @BobSnot I can’t find a Folder named “photo transcoder”…
