Use a RAM-Drive for transcoding cache? How big should the RAMDrive be?

General Discussions
1

I’ve been toying with the idea of reducing the wear and tear on my primary drive. My server has 4 drives on it, and uses the OS drive for transcoding. My media is direct MKV rips, so unless I’m playing on local computer using PMP, it transcodes everything. My server isn’t a powerhouse, but it is capable enough to meet my needs. My main goal is to reduce the wear on my drive.

All my media is 480p DVD rips to MKV, or 576p handbrake MKV reductions of BD. I don’t have the storage capacity or processing power to use BlueRay rips. I’m fine with that, really I am. Image quality is good enough where I still enjoy watching my content.

If I’ve got a maximum of 3 people streaming from my server at once (due to upload bandwidth), what size RAMDrive would I optimally need, and what is the minimum size I would need? My server can’t hold much. 24GB I know I can get, 32GB might be max. I’d think a 4GB or 8GB RAMDrive would suffice, but I’m not sure. Either way, it’s an expense, and I don’t even know if I have the budget for it currently.

2

I Play around with 8GB ram-drive.
It is enough for 2 streams 720P
I think for a 2mbps 720P stream you need 2GB for 2,5std movie.
It depends on the stream outgoing Quality. Higher streams 1080P 8mbps Needs more GB for 1 hour stream.

3

Good insight. I appreciate the info. Makes it a bit more obtainable. :slight_smile:

4

Do you have a spare or capability to add an a cheap SSD? Makes a night and day difference for me.

5

I had my Plex Data and transcoder on my SSD and it worked fine, but now I changed only my transcoder path to the RAMDisk for two reasons.

  1. I think the movie starts just Little bit faster
  2. I spare my SSD from dying faster.
6

I could dangle a drive inside the chassis. Not optimal, and I don’t really want to toss a SSD on there just for transcoding. I’d rather use that as the OS drive for speed in launching software. Unfortunately, the SSDs I have laying around, are too small in contrast to the data I have on there. I get what you’re saying though. I’d rather not put the wear and tear on a SSD, and just toss this task to a RAM Drive.

7

A ram drive sounds like a good idea and RHEL supports it. I just ordered 16gb of ram for my server. I wish older dell’s proprietary server ram was cheap :confused: