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.
Off-topic:
No utilities can read the actual rotation speed of a HDD: there is simply no command specified for that in the ATA/ATAPI Command Set.
You are probably the first human being that can tell the rotation speed of a HDD by "feeling it". If you could "hear" your HDD it would most probably sound like this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlK0BXyRDDQ
I didn't say the utility told you the rotation speed. I didn't say anything of the sort. I said you can see the drive state. As in minimum power with head park, minimum power with standby, intermediate power with standby, intermediate power without standby and maximum power. I honestly don't get why you're arguing with me when you clearly have no knowledge on the subject.
You would actually be the first human being that can't tell your HDD is spinning be feeling it. If you can't tell the difference between a hard drive that is spinning and one that is parked by touch then you have no nerves in your hands. The slowest HDDs with the least amount of vibration still produce significant vibrations that any human being can easily feel.
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.
This is pretty blatant misinformation. An SSD will blow any HDD out of the water in write speeds and the shortening of an SSD's lifespan due to large file writes and overwrites is pretty much a non issue anymore.
This is pretty blatant misinformation. An SSD will blow any HDD out of the water in write speeds and the shortening of an SSD's lifespan due to large file writes and overwrites is pretty much a non issue anymore.
I guess you have not carefully read the entire topic. I was explaing that using an SSD for storing the transcoder output is not giving advantages to Plex. The reason is that the limiting factor in this case is the CPU and not the drive.
If you quote you should not change the original content.
Seriously? You are the one that misquoted me several times claiming I said that 1) the utility gave you "speed" and 2) that you could feel the "speed".
I never said either of those things and you quoted me as such. So who is changing the original content?
As I said you clearly have no knowledge on this subject as you further elaborate by claiming there are no advantages to using an SSD for transcoding which is also blatantly false. There are plenty of people who have resolved buffering issues by moving their transcoder directory to a SSD when transcoding multiple streams.
I'm done responding to your posts as I'm fairly certain no one is going to take anything you say seriously at this point anyway.
I guess you have not carefully read the entire topic. I was explaing that using an SSD for storing the transcoder output is not giving advantages to Plex. The reason is that the limiting factor in this case is the CPU and not the drive.
Why didn't you make one mention of a CPU then? Regardless I'm not saying an SSD would provide a huge benefit for this as I'm not certain if that is currently a bottleneck or not. I just want to make sure people are not misinformed.
SSD helps for the internal database and images, which are in the app directory. I would not suggest turning off spindown. I am not suggesting it would have any appreciable impact on transcoding but does have one in browsing speed.
solution.. switch to a ZFS array and add a SSD log and cache drive.. When an item is read the entire thing is moved to the cache where it is held until pushed out by a new file.. First in last out..
Since my SSD cache is 100gb and my video files are ~3gb this means that the last ~33 movies are cached.. ZFS will play from the cache first before the array is hit...
It doesnt solve the spin up time, never noticed, but once in the cash your drive can go back to sleep..
solution.. switch to a ZFS array and add a SSD log and cache drive.. When an item is read the entire thing is moved to the cache where it is held until pushed out by a new file.. First in last out..
Since my SSD cache is 100gb and my video files are ~3gb this means that the last ~33 movies are cached.. ZFS will play from the cache first before the array is hit...
It doesnt solve the spin up time, never noticed, but once in the cash your drive can go back to sleep..
FreeNAS is probably the easiest ZFS implementation and that is over most people's heads.... ideally everyone would be storing their files on ZFS but it's not so plug and play. The cache would help if you watch part of a video (if it cache's the entire file) or if you watched the same video over and over. If you're always watching unwatched content though it's only going to read as fast as the HDD it lives on..... which is plenty fast enough for a single stream. If you don't notice spinup time then you either aren't spinning down or you just don't really care about the time it takes to spin up. Most people wouldn't if they knew what it was doing... but a lot of people think that delay is their playback software freezing and tend to report issues before they find out the HDDs are spinning up. Depending on the type of array it can take a long time if all drives have to spin up before you can read and you have a lot of drives.
solution.. switch to a ZFS array and add a SSD log and cache drive.. When an item is read the entire thing is moved to the cache where it is held until pushed out by a new file.. First in last out..
Since my SSD cache is 100gb and my video files are ~3gb this means that the last ~33 movies are cached.. ZFS will play from the cache first before the array is hit...
It doesnt solve the spin up time, never noticed, but once in the cash your drive can go back to sleep..
This is an extremely interesting solution but I'm thinking more about music playback than movies. The required space for caching music should not be as big as for movies and chances are high that the favorite music gets played again several times.
Keeping the HDD down on a computer especially while listening to music is a very nice thing because you have less noise.
Do you think this could be implemented on a Windows setup also?
This is an extremely interesting solution but I'm thinking more about music playback than movies. The required space for caching music should not be as big as for movies and chances are high that the favorite music gets played again several times.
Keeping the HDD down on a computer especially while listening to music is a very nice thing because you have less noise.
Do you think this could be implemented on a Windows setup also?
Or you could use unRAID and put your music directories only on low-noise drives. Once the drive(s) is up for the music directory, it will remain so until you have a period of inactivity. I make sure that all of my short-length content is grouped. This means that all cartoons (normally at 8 minutes or less, not animated series or movies) are kept together on a drive. The same is true for music and music videos. Once I play one of them, the drive is spun up for the others. I mind drive spin up time a lot less when it is for a 2-hour movie than I do for a 3 minute song.
This is one of the advantages of unRAID: you can put as much effort into tuning as you choose. Drives wake and sleep independently, allowing you to store content intelligently according to how it is used. On the other side, the content is still easily manageable via the shares because the drive complexity is hidden. Movies are split at the individual movie level. TV shows are split at the series level (so watching multiple episodes never involves waking a drive up in the middle). Short content of a particular type is always on a single drive, regardless of artist, series, etc.
You specifically asked about a Windows setup. I will say that I find Windows to be the worst match for a system like this. After a certain point, the core cost of the system is negligible compared to the cost of drives. It may be worth it to split out the storage solution to a different machine so that it is managed effectively. Outside of drives and drive controllers, and drive cages, there is only about $300-400 of hardware in my Plex box running unRAID.
@agregjones: Thanks for the input. I don't think I would change to unRaid since I'm very happy with my setup and I'm very familiar with my soft- and hardware but some of your hints are very useful.
I have the feeling that we are not going to see any solution coming soon for an implementation of some sort of "media prefetch" in Plex and I still think that the suggestion by tomt92 is a good approach.
This is an extremely interesting solution but I'm thinking more about music playback than movies. The required space for caching music should not be as big as for movies and chances are high that the favorite music gets played again several times.
Keeping the HDD down on a computer especially while listening to music is a very nice thing because you have less noise.
Do you think this could be implemented on a Windows setup also?
Sorry ZFS is a linnux (ios included) and Sun solution only.. ZFS is a storage solution but also a file system so I doubt it could be ported to the windows environment. As itznfb mentioned there is FeeNas, which is a good product and does support ZFS. It would require a dedicated system but to be honest i found that the plex server actually runs faster, and with less overhead on linux then Windows so my choice was an Ubuntu based server.
@itznfb -- I have noticed a delay from when i hit play and when the video will start. To be honest i always marked this up as plex getting the capabilities of the player and engaging the transcoder if necessary. Its really only a 1-2 second delay so it never bother me as Netflix takes longer where i live.. :)
Sorry ZFS is a linnux (ios included) and Sun solution only.. ZFS is a storage solution but also a file system so I doubt it could be ported to the windows environment. As itznfb mentioned there is FeeNas, which is a good product and does support ZFS. It would require a dedicated system but to be honest i found that the plex server actually runs faster, and with less overhead on linux then Windows so my choice was an Ubuntu based server.
In the meanwhile I found software for Windows to use memory space from a SSD as cache for HDD's.
I only use it for music since that's where I think additional cache brings most benefits in my case (music runs most of the time with a focus on my favorites). It does exactly what you described and my HDD's are now sleeping most of the time. THX again for the suggestion
I am interested in this feature, but for different reasons. It isn’t about time for my disks to spin up, or the noise from it, but rather to minimize thrashing when there are multiple concurrent users. I have a ton of spinning disks where all of my content is dumped, and a smaller amount of SSD space that I’d ideally like to automatically have Plex use for predictive caching.
The way I’d like to see it implemented is to allow the user to specify a directory for a “predictive video cache”, optionally with a quota target.
Plex would then make intelligent use of that space. Start up a new season of a TV series? Pre-load the rest of the episodes. New episodes show up for a series being watched? Cache it. Etc.
I think the discussion about FreeNAS and ZFS kinda derailed a possibly cool feature. Filesystem level caching doesn’t have the higher level intent/relationship data that Plex does in order to cache intelligently to the degree Plex could. I’d like to see the first read of content hit the cache, and Plex could make that happen.
In the absence of this feature I could probably use ZFS + a cron job running during off hours to scrape logs and warm caches manually but it’d be cool if this was just built into Plex.
My Plex server is a standalone machine with a 1TB SSD in it. All of my media conent is stored on a seperate network attached storage device. with only a normal gibabit ethernet link between the two, it would be cool to have predictive cache or any type of cache where the 1TB local SSD can be utilised and save accessing the NAS on the network.
Transcoding directory is local, so esentailly the same thing, but just for on deck content.
