So this could be an incredibly useful feature to have on deck items placed on a SSD to allow playback without having to wait for your drive to spin up. Also being able to have recently added placed on SSD. I know it may not be needed for most people but I for one hate having to wait for my drives to spin up.
For best performance I would just change the "The path where local application data is stored" to your SSD drive under General Settings.
This is what I've done in addition to changing the "Transcoder temporary directory" to point at my SSD too.
Copying files around onto an SSD as a cache (background type task) is not really worth it, given the potential complexities.
My drives only take 5-10 secs to spin up, and I'm happy to wait. Keeping things simple is the best approach.
This is what I've done in addition to changing the "Transcoder temporary directory" to point at my SSD too.
I'm not sure if you can really improve your system by doing so, especially if your SSD is not very large.
SSD are incredibly fast for reading but the week part is writing. They can be even much, much worse than good old HDD in this.
Overall this is probably not giving any advantage at all for Plex but will eventually shorten your SSD's life.
I beg to differ 400MB write speed on my SSD pans my non raided conventional hard disks write speed. I can stream 5 simultaneous transcoded streams on my SSD (250 GB ) without any issues.SSD are incredibly fast for reading but the week part is writing. They can be even much, much worse than good old HDD in this.
Overall this is probably not giving any advantage at all for Plex but will eventually shorten your SSD's life.
You might have an exceptionally fast writing SSD then. Many SSD's don't even reach 1/3 of their reading speed when writing and even this value can drop another 80% when the SSD is working under permanent load
This was certainly the case with early SSD's but I think with anything released in the last year or so you are probably good. Single consume grade SSDs will max out a SATA 3gbs bus both reading and writing sequentially.
I think if we reach the point where we can't wait for 5 second for a hard disk to spin up before watching TV we have some issues to think about :)
For best performance I would just change the "The path where local application data is stored" to your SSD drive under General Settings.
This is what I've done in addition to changing the "Transcoder temporary directory" to point at my SSD too.
I quite like this idea. My main thing is that I hate opening plex then having to wait a good 15-30 seconds for it to spin up the drives before I even browse my media. I wonder if Plex would spin up the media drives once I begin accessing the metadata. I need to do some testing this weekend but I really hope this is the case because that would provide me with more of what I want.
i tend to agree, all my ssd drives are fast, my week old mbp is about 750mbs write speed, my mini has about 500mbs write speed and my windows has about 400mbs (oldest and cheapest drive).
I think the modern ssd are much better than spinning disk drives, back in the day i would have agreed but now......
I quite like this idea. My main thing is that I hate opening plex then having to wait a good 15-30 seconds for it to spin up the drives before I even browse my media. I wonder if Plex would spin up the media drives once I begin accessing the metadata. I need to do some testing this weekend but I really hope this is the case because that would provide me with more of what I want.
In my experience Plex seems to sometimes spin up the drive containing the media when I open the info page in plex/web, before I've even played it. I believe it's reanalysing the file or making sure it still exists, but because of that I get a couple of seconds delay when opening the page.
It would seem that sort of thing is unavoidable for now, unless you put all your media on an SSD (hah).
You could force a spinup of the media drive by symlinking a folder there to the SSD. I haven’t tested this possibility yet but I’m thinking about the folder where the logs are written to. In theory as soon as PMS starts writing to the logfile the drive should spin up. Not sure if this would also slow down the PMS start though. I will try this out when I have some spare time
Don't spin down your hard drives. Problem solved.
Don't spin down your hard drives. Problem solved.
I second that lol. I don't spin down the drives ever in my NAS. Though it does also have its own SSD cache and 10 spinning hard drives so it does not have a performance issue either way. But anyways simple solution is not to spin down the drives.
Hmm... beside electricity consumption which might not be an issue to everybody, what about heath? Doesn't it get quite hot inside the box with 10 HDD spinning all the time?
Edit: Wish I could delete posts.
Hmm... beside electricity consumption which might not be an issue to everybody, what about heath? Doesn't it get quite hot inside the box with 10 HDD spinning all the time?
No. HDDs need very little airflow to maintain their operating temperature. So as long as they have any fan moving air over them they should be fine. I wouldn't leave them in some enclosure with no airflow though. Any modern hard drive does it's own power management anyway. Most RAID and HBA cards no longer have power management features on them for this reason. LSI has even removed the power management features from their firmware for cards that support it.
The Western Digital Red drives for example will remain spinning but only use about .4~.5W. When they are active they'll spin a bit faster and consume about 4~6W. So electricity consumption shouldn't even be a concern. The WD Reds are the best for power savings followed by the HGST Coolspin and NAS while the Seagate 7200's are the worst and the Seagate NAS are the 2nd worst.
I'll add that there is no publicly available data to provide an argument either way on whether spinning drives down or leaving them spin has an impact on the longevity of the drive. If someone tell you one way or the other then it's just their opinion. It is popular opinion among data center managers and system admins that letting the drives spin 24/7 is better for longevity. I've been a system admin for many years and that is my opinion as well. It's clearly based on personal experience though.
There are several different opinions on this matter.
Eventually you don't live in a country where energy costs are about 3 times higher than in the U.S. and are still rapidly increasing. But there are people that care about this and others who think that they don't like to spend money on waste.
I seriously doubt that there is any dynamic speed adjustment in the WD red's that can possibly lower the power consumption near zero as you suggest. What you indicate is more likely the power consumption for the drive when it's down. Consumptions in idle have been measured around 3,5 - 4 Watts. The difference between idle and HD-streaming is actually very little, just 10%.
It's also basic physics that this energy is finally converted completely into heath and it's general knowledge that high temperatures increase the risk of disk failure.
If you want to keep your energy bill low AND your box cool there is no way that get's you around using some energy saving options. Letting the drives spin down is not a minor one: it brings about 30% less power consumption on my setup.
I just have to make a comment on how this is such a 1st world problem.
You want someone to take the time to write the code, test the code and maintain the code so that you can save less than 15 seconds when watching a movie? You talk about the cost of keeping a HDD spinning but you'll spend the extra money on an SSD, and then kill the life of it by adding and removing the videos from it based upon what is within On Deck. The writes are what give an SSD shorter life.
Now all ridicule aside, this would be impossible to do because the On Deck is dynamically created for each user and people that have multiple users would have 40 files each moving around. I think you would actually hurt performance because you would be constantly moving files back and forth depending on the On Deck selections while trying to watch ranscode something, this again by itself would cause your HDD to stay up and running when you're not using it thereby defeating the original purpose of this request.
There are several different opinions on this matter.
Eventually you don't live in a country where energy costs are about 3 times higher than in the U.S. and are still rapidly increasing. But there are people that care about this and others who think that they don't like to spend money on waste.
I seriously doubt that there is any dynamic speed adjustment in the WD red's that can possibly lower the power consumption near zero as you suggest. What you indicate is more likely the power consumption for the drive when it's down. Consumptions in idle have been measured around 3,5 - 4 Watts. The difference between idle and HD-streaming is actually very little, just 10%.
It's also basic physics that this energy is finally converted completely into heath and it's general knowledge that high temperatures increase the risk of disk failure.
If you want to keep your energy bill low AND your box cool there is no way that get's you around using some energy saving options. Letting the drives spin down is not a minor one: it brings about 30% less power consumption on my setup.
So the power savings provided by modern drives isn't an opinion at all. It's fact. The WD Red drives most certainly do run at the stated power consumption specs. Check the data sheet. I love when people ask questions and then start arguing their ignorant opinions as if they are fact.
Here is the data sheet: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771442.pdf
As I said modern drives utilize technology to keep the drive spinning and use virtually no power. Each manufacturer uses different terminology and WD calls their lowest power state Standby or Sleep. In the Idle state it uses less power but it's still spinning at full speed and the latency delta is going to be about .1 ~ .3 ms. Virtually nothing but the power saving is also low. After about 20 minutes of inactivity it'll go into Standby where the spindle will hit a lower RPM in the 2000-3000 range and the motor won't continuously drive the spindle. It'll use momentum as the consistent speed needed for reads and writes isn't a requirement. When a read or write is requested the access latency delta will be close to 2 or 3 ms but no where near the 10 to 30 seconds people experience when waiting for spun down drives to spin back up. Seriously.... people just don't get that spinning down drives is a legacy practive from the 90's. It's just not necessary anymore under any circumstance.
Also, I've meaured these power consumption specs with a multimeter and they are accurate. The Read/Write requirements do produce a slightly higher power consumption usage than stated on the sheet but all others were accurate. Also, the Red drives are not capable of spin down without flashing different firmware. So no I don't even have the capability of measuring the spun down power consumption without flashing different firmware.
This is getting quite offtopic but out of curiosity, on what is your statement regarding the HDD not spinning down when in standby based on?
Nobody is questioning the energy consumption stated in the product sheet. They are confirmed by many tech-sides and by personal measurements also. These drives are therefore an excellent choice for a use in a media center environment.
I even experience a relatively short dilay while the drive are spinning up compared to other drives I have used before, usually no more than 3 or 4 seconds.
Because you can use WD load utils to view the drive state and optionally configure a standby mode with head parking. Or even simpler... you can measure the power used with a multimeter and feel that the drive is still spinning.
