Temporary file location for movies on ssd

Plex Media Server
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Hi everybody sorry for my English, French is my mother tongue,
Last night i came to realised that we could maybe supercharge our plex media server and reducing the stress on hdd. In fact when 2-3 people where watching different movies through 1 hdd this one was in hard work (the head of the hdd was moving forward and backward a lot) and iops are bad on hdd. So came an idea why not use an ssd and is many iops where temporarily we copie the entire file like we are doing for temporary transcode file (the reconcialiation was made by @sretalla on freenas). This way we could stream as much as we can possibly store on the ssd without stressing the hdd.

Is there a way to do it in scripts or maybe a way to expose this to dev ?

Thank you for futur answers

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Interesting idea and this might work for small files, but the delay to do this would get annoying long the larger the file.

A typical hard drive reads at a peak of ~150 MBps. So a 1.5 GB movie would take 10 seconds to read and put into your SDD before anything else could be done. A 15 GB movie would take 100 seconds.

What you are describing is a hybrid SDD/HDD which already exist and basically does this at the drive level without any user intervention.

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if you are reaching io limits on a single hard drive, then its time to move to a better storage system, like a nas or dedicated server.

for transcoding, you can change the transcode temp folder, although I would not use ssd for that.

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and finally if you are using a linux server, you can use bcache https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcache to use a dedicated ssd drive to cache other disk access.

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Thanks for your answers :wink:,
In fact it will be for large file full blu-ray and full blu-ray 4k (over 40GB) and storage will be a raidz2 from freenas. I would expect 600MB/s read from it so 1.2min for 50GB to copy to nvme ssd. But it’s 600MB/s read séquentielle not rendom that’s why i think it might bé a good Idea.
Could we find a way to make a script about it ?
BTW bcache is only for write, non?
Thanks for your help

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So you’re willing to wait at least 1.2 minutes from the time you hit play until playback actually starts?

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Actually yes it wouldn’t be a problem for my and my users if i can inform them about the time remaining at there screen with a script.
If we can implemant this it will be awsome in term of performance and how much people can be watching at the same time and it will dramaticaly reduce nas utilisation.

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