PMS migration from Synology to Intel NUC onto secondary SSD

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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My Synology DS1813+ is on its last legs in terms of keeping up with the performance demands of Plex.

After much rigamarole trying to figure out what better Synology to buy (Hardware transcoding on DS720+ versus DS723+), I was convinced to buy an Intel NUC 9 with an additional 1 TB SSD.

I intend to install Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS and have it run PMS, mounting in the actual media library from the Synology DS1813+.

It’s been a while since I’ve run Ubuntu, so my Linux skills are a bit rusty. I’m looking for some guidance on the best way to go about getting PMS to put all its files onto the secondary SSD; specifically:

  • what filesystem I should use on the primary 512-GB SSD that the OS will run on and on the secondary 1-TB SSD that PMS will keep its library metadata files on-- ext4, zfs, btrfs?
  • where to mount the secondary 1-TB SSD
  • how to get Plex to install all its files in that location

I’ve reviewed the following posts, but I’m still a bit fuzzy on what to do:

Now, I understand from Move an Install to Another System that I’ll need to do a regular installation on the new system anyway, so I think all of the above applies to that part of the process, and that’s what tells me that on “Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu”, the default location for PMS data is at

/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/

So a few thoughts occur to me, particularly if I want to be able to use this secondary 1-TB SSD for other purposes, too. (After all, my library metadata will not use up a full terabyte!)

Doing a little bit of research, it seems that the best practice might be to mount the secondary 1-TB SSD to something like /volume1 (since, in my mind, the SSD that the OS is running on is “volume 0”).

I could then create a directory in there specifically for PMS, say /volume1/Plex.

I figure it’s then time to do some symlinking, but I’m not sure what I should symlink to what. On my Synology, the Plex package creates a Plex folder that contains all the library metadata files (separate from my media libraries):
Screenshot 2022-11-03 at 16.28.48
(For what it’s worth–and this is sheer coincidence–that top-level Plex is actually at /volume1/Plex on the Synology, so I suppose there will be some parallelism…)

My thinking, given the default locations on Ubuntu for these files, would be that, after doing a vanilla installation of PMS on Ubuntu, when I get to the Place on the Destination System step, I would

  1. copy /volume1/Plex from the Synology to /volume1/Plex on the Intel NUC
  2. on the Intel NUC, sudo chown -R plex /volume1/Plex
  3. on the Intel NUC, sudo mv /var/lib/plexmediaserver /var/lib/plexmediaserver.bak && sudo ln -s /volume1/Plex /var/lib/plexmediaserver

Is this basically right?

And another question that occurs to me is where the binaries live for PMS, and whether those should also go onto the SSD, if that even matters.

Thanks for any help y’all can render!

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You got the essentials right.

What you don’t know, which is unique to DSM 6-based Plex servers , is going from the Syno to workstation Linux takes a bit of processing. It’s a one-time, single-pass effort which can be automated.

The amount of processing is the same as is done when “DSM 7 migration” occurs.
Obviously dependent on Library size, it’s about 10-15 seconds of elapsed time on a decent workstation machine to complete.

I will detail further when you’re ready

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This processing…is it something that I need to kick off myself, or will it happen automatically after I go through the steps I outlined above and start PMS again? Is the whole mount point and symlinking approach right? Anything I ought to do differently?

Thanks!

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