SSD wearing out fast while Plex Server is running

General Discussions
1

In about 1 year I wore out an SSD on my plex server machine. It is a Windows 10 machine with nothing else but plex installed. . After searching I moves all the cache directories and transcode stuff to my hard drive in plex configuration settings, but my new disc is wearing out just as fast as before.

Since installation I has accumulated 365TB of writes. Where is this coming from?

I have not been able to find a definitive answer so far. None of my media is on my OS SSD.

Please Help!!!

-david BTW

2

Every direct streamed and every transcoded playback is caching the data packets in the transcoder temporary folder.
If your clients require transcoding or at least remuxing all the time and cannot direct-play, then you’ll probably be better off by redirecting this temporary folder to a different drive.

Settings - Server - Transcoder - ‘Show Advanced’ - “Transcoder temporary directory”

It also helps if you make sure that Plex is not removing media from your libraries and re-adding them all the time.
This can easily happen if your media is on external, or networked storage and you have this option activated:
Settings - Server - Library - ‘Empty trash automatically after every scan’
Disable this if your media drives are not physically inside the Plex server device.

3

Thanks for your response.

  1. I have already moved my transcoder temporary directory to my normal hard drive. That did not solve my problem. That was the first thing I tried based upon other recommendations. I also verified by look at the temp directory that indeed the small temporary files are coming and going on that directory as playback or transcode.

  2. All of my media is on a single hard drive on the machine. The SSD is only for the OS. Still it gives me a clue to look at the re-scanning.

  3. I will continue to look. This has been a puzzle, and one 256 GB drive is now toast because of it and the second is down to 86% of its life in a month. The disk is rated for approx 160 TB of lifetime writes, and my utilities are now reporting 38 TB in a little over a month.

-david BTW

4

Do you or your shared users use the Sync feature of Plex a lot?
How often did you rebuild your plex library?
How often do you instruct Plex to Refresh Metadata for a whole library? (This should never be necessary and should never be done out of habit.)
Try disabling these ‘Scheduled Tasks’

  • Remove old cache files every week
  • Refresh local metadata every three days
  • Update all libraries during maintenance
5

I went in to “Scheduled Tasks” as you suggested and disabled all scheduled tasks as I was losing nearly 1% of lifetime every day on my disk monitor program.

So far that has helped and may have cured the problem. I may turn some of tasks back on with the exception of the three you mentioned to see if I can determine which one was causing the problem.

Thanks,

-david BTW

6

After three days of running my total writes to the OS drive have not increased. I do not know which of the settings I disabled did the trick, because I turned everything off.

Thanks for the help. At least on my system, that solved my problem. Perhaps now my SSD will last a bit longer.

Sincere Thanks,

-david BTW

7

Re-enable them one by one, each week.
Start with

  • Backup database every three days
  • Optimize database every week
  • Perform refresh of program guide data.
  • Upgrade media analysis during maintenance
  • Perform extensive media analysis during maintenance
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