Plex, I have a Drobo 5D3 (5 spinning disks and 500gb of mSATA accelerator installed) storing all my media. I installed the Plex app and set the Transcoder temporary directory to my internal SSD. I figured this would be the optimal setup. I guess I was wrong… I have the recommended HDHomeRun CONNECT Quatro tunner and my storage is choking on the post processing of recorded shows. Is there any plans for future releases to be able to set a temporary directory for when the DVR is writing the show to disk and the performing post analytics/actions? For example the DVR would record then process the show on my internal SSD, then once the file is ready for playback it would move it to the correct folder on my slower and higher capacity storage.
Any feed back from Plex Support or the community would be appreciated. Thanks. (Screenshot attached below of the disk activity that’s giving me trouble)
I was just optimizing my new server and came across your inquiry.
Probably the best practice for a temporary directory for encoding would be a RAMdisk if you have enough RAM to spare.
In your case - the DROBO probably runs a linux or OpenBSD system and you may be able to configure a RAMdisk and then point PLEX’s temporary directory for encoding to it.
A RAMdisk would be much faster at read-writes than spinning data disks, and using an SSD for the temp directory for encoding is a good way to quickly kill your SSD.
I run my PLEX server in an Ubuntu VM on FreeNAS on a host with 56 hyperthreaded cores and 128GB of RAM. I assign 16 threads(virtual cores) and 32 GiB to the Ubuntu Server VM and mount a 20GiB RamDisk on bootup with a line in the /etc/vstab. I then point the PLEX server encoder to the RamDisk mounted location.
If i have a power loss longer than what my power backup can handle, then my RamDisk fails and I’ll lose the encoding, but if that happens i would have been screwed using any type of temp disk…
