after endless troubleshooting and having just abandoned the whole Plex on RPI4 experience, I got back to it today to try one last thing.
Issue: no matter what I streamed (direct play), it would buffer constantly. Cause: RPI4 is not able to READ FAST ENOUGH from the external HDD, hence the buffering.
Troubleshooting steps: copying a 50mb file from the extHDD to the desktop on the RPI4 took a good 20 minutes, which was already a sign that something was wrong.
I then created a new library directly on the desktop and no buffering was observed
Write to ext4 usb hard drive is fast
Reading from is slow
The format of the HDD is ext4.
At this point, any ideas of next steps? is it just a setting? do I need to reformat the drive ? (ideally that would be last step as I don’t want to lose the data on it as I don’t have another hard drive to clone to.
I’d try to sort out that issue using a variety of thumb drives and file systems and USB ports. I would never expect writes to be fast and reads to be slow.
It’s worth examining how much RAM you have versus how much is being used. If the RPi swaps, you’re toast. I noticed Chromium was a ridiculous hog, using 60% of my RAM just to read some Python docs online.
You could use a simple dd command to test the read and write speed.
I’d take your tests over to their forums, as they will be able to help you diagnose the bottleneck faster. More experienced eyes over there will see your thread.
Some things to bear in mind. A thumb drive will bypass the possibility of a cheap cable malfunctioning. SMART data might give you some insight too. You might be able to use a faster micro sd card.
