I’ve been a long time Plex Pass user and use the same windows “server” for the last 10 years. My system cannot be updated to Windows 11 so I needed to replace it. I know I can force it, but I don’t want to deal with the problems it could come with.
I finally went with an Asus NUC 15 Pro 255H, 2Tb Samsung 990 Pro and 32gb of G.Skill 5600 cl40. It’s overkill for what I use it for but it’s futur proof imo.
Now, except the wear and tear aspect of it all, is there any other reason I should install another NVME drive only for transcoding? Are there any other advantages?
If you’re running Plex as a docker container, you can actually mount a tmfs RAM mount as transcode storage. If you do this, temporary transcodes will be written to RAM, which is much faster and doesn’t put wear on your drives. Wear is especially an issue with SSDs if you do frequent writes (reads not so much).
If you decide to mount RAM as transcode storage, make sure it’s enough for your transcode buffer duration and average movie size. If it’s too little, Plex will crash without warning during transcodes due to OOM (out of memory).
Don’t worry about allocating a lot of ram to the container. The memory is not reserved until used and may be used by other processes until required by Plex.
I have 32 GB Ram allocated to the transcode mount with a 300s buffer timer. That is probably way too much and you can get a away with 16 GB but I have a lot of spare RAM, so I don’t care. I did run into OOM crashes with 16GB and 900s buffer timer with high-bitrate movies. So do with that information what you will.
I use a tool called ImDisk Ramdisk. It creates a fake drive using your RAM. I set this drive letter to R: and set my transcoding directory to this drive. Transcoding is much faster
If you are looking for a drive for transcoding, you likely don’t need an NVME drive but instead a USB SSD would likely serve you better. They are less expensive because they aren’t as fast. Though unless you are doing a tremendous number of simultaneous transcodes (more than I think your hardware can do), the speed will not be an issue. If you do the math on the wear and compare against the size of the disk, a 1TB drive would last through more wear than you can induce in decades of non-stop transcoding. Just make sure you use a reputable brand. Even a spinning drive would likely be fast enough for transcodes if you want to go that route.
I highly recommend against even thinking about a ram disk like the others suggest. It severely limits the abilities of the machine by RAM being stolen for transcodes, it can invoke the OS to kill processes to free up ram, if you have swap it can cause processes to swap to your NVME inducing the very wear you seek to avoid, and a host of other problems. Don’t do this!
The only reason I was thinking of adding a drive for transcode was for the wear of the main NVME drive, not for speed. I do not do much transcode as I force my users to buy up to date hardware to direct Play. But some of them still use TV software and old devices and they do transcode from 4k to 1080p. I’m just trying to figure out is it worth it or not in the long run.
It will kill processes in the docker container first. Most likely, Plex will just crash when there is not enough RAM.
But you are right in that you should only use a tmpfs in RAM when you’re absolutely sure that you have RAM to spare. Monitor your average RAM usage by other applications running on your server and the RAM usage of the system itself. Add 20% headroom. Give the rest to Plex. You should be fine.
Plex won’t fill the entire transcode volume anyways. A 5min 4K transcode is at most a couple GB. Plex dynamically creates .ts and .mp4 files for the current buffer and deletes them once they are no longer needed.
If you have 20GB RAM to spare for sure, just go for it. Don’t worry.
I do not want to make a ram drive, I know how they work. And above all, I’m on windows 11, not Linux, as my main post says. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
I’m talking about using an NVME drive for transcoding to minimize strain on the main NVME that runs the server. Just want to know if it’s worth it or not.
Fair enough. I think that might be worth it in your case. When your transcode drive dies, you can just replace it easily. When your boot drive dies, it’ll be a pain in the ass (I hope you have backups).
I’m on windows 11
Docker is not limited to Linux. You can host your Plex server with Docker and Ram tmpfs on Windows too afaik.
Nun sag doch mal, mit welchem Verschleiß ich bei einer WD-RED SN700 500GB rechnen muss. Diese SSD wird ja mit einer TWB von 1000TB beworben. Welche Schreib-Last produziert z.B. ein 2 Stunden 4k-Film, welcher in 1080p und DTS 5.1 in AAC transcodiert wird? Gibt es hierzu irgendwelche Angaben?
Why get yourself into this problem in the first place? You may find it acceptable to be randomly in a situation where the OOM killer is invoked and terminates processes, but I don’t. A 1TB USD SSD like I described is on par with the cost of a few 10s of GB of RAM and avoids this whole situation.
NO!!! DO NOT USE PMS IN DOCKER ON WINDOWS! This is a sure way to get database corruption because of the way that docker on windows implements mounts. This is another bad idea on top of the bad idea of using a RAM disk.
For those who don’t know, I was a PMS developer for a decade so I do know these things.
O!!! DO NOT USE PMS IN DOCKER ON WINDOWS! This is a sure way to get database corruption because of the way that docker on windows implements mounts. This is another bad idea on top of the bad idea of using a RAM disk.
Good to know. I’m not too familiar with Windows, haven’t used Windows in years. I just knew Docker on Windows was a thing so I assumed it would just work.
