I have 4 HDD, each 4TB in RAID 0. When I select a video to watch, it takes about 20 seconds for the disks to spin up in order to get the first bit of buffering out of the way. When I’m remote, it takes about 30-45 seconds.
Is there a way to have some sort of a cache? I would love to use something like a 2TB solid state drive to store the first 60 seconds of each of my videos, so when I select them, the playback begins instantly and then by the time it would need to buffer, the disks have had plenty of time to spin up.
Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this? Obvioiusly, I don’t want to take each of my videos, cut out 60 seconds and then use those as a separate file. It would be amazing if it was like an automated process each time a video is added.
Maybe you already know but your raid implementation is a recipe for disaster.
edit:
my set up is two 3tb disks in raid1 for media. PMS is on a separate computer that accesses the media over nfs, and mine is pretty fast, hardly any buffering unless you are on the internet trying access my media but even then its only a few seconds. There must be something else slowing you down.
I know the risks of RAID 0 - I have a NAS with matching drives that I do a weekly backup on.
There is a chance that one of the drives is beginning to slow down which is slowing everything down. Should one die, I’d get a replacement and then copy the content back over. I could also point the plex server to the NAS files to get it back up and running during the repair time.
I just thought it would be cool if PLEX had what I’m looking for. SSD storage is so much more expensive than HDD, it would make a ton of sense
5400 or 7200 spinning drives should be fine as long as they have proper raid. I have the WD 5400 nas reds and they’re fine. No slowdowns.
If one of your drives dies, then you may have to erase or format all your drives and then copy all your data over from your backup. This is a terrible solution, but to each their own.
It’s important that your plex server has enough cpu and/or gpu, and ram. Mine is not too powerful, it’s a Intel NUC with an i5, 16gb ram, 128gb nvme ssd. But it handles transcoding just fine, cpu gets up there but it works well with 2 or 3 simultaneous remote sessions. I have AT&T 1GB up/down fiber internet, so if your upload speed on your internet is slow this will effect your remote watching experience.
This sounds partly related to transcoding and CPU/RAM, especially if you are playing over the internet to mobile. I have a very old QNAP NAS TS-451 which I maxed out the RAM to 8MB and it has 4x4TB in a RAID5 (for all the reasons others have explained here which has proven effective as it’s still going strong). In my house I have zero lag and all movies start up almost instantly. I also have 1GB ethernet which also helps, to my Apple TV / Plex app. However, playing externally it’s got to heavily transcode. So what CPU and RAM are you using and is it a NAS or spare computer? This very well could be your bottleneck.
You also mention caching and more current NAS boxes include this via SSD and even M.2 NVMe, as well as Intelligent Tiering with a Hot/Warm/Cold organization. If you bought a reasonably cheap external USB drive with enough capacity, you could back your files up to it, and then swap out one of your HDD’s and throw in a single SSD and set it up as a cache (I’m kind of assuming you have a NAS to easily make this work). Then I would rebuild your 3 other 3 HDD’s into a RAID 0 and not worry about RAID 5 since you’ve backed everything up already. OR you could get 2 smaller SSD’s in a RAID 0 as a cache and 2 significantly larger HDD’s also in a RAID 0 and that might give you both the speed boost you’re hoping for. Just wanted to show you the least expensive options to wring more out of what you already have. However, no kind of caching or tiering or files is really going to help you play a movie faster that’s been sitting on the drive unplayed for 5 -10 years.
But if it’s the CPU/RAM bottlenecking things, you may just be stuck with the only option being upgrading the system/NAS you are using.
10th gen i3
16GB DDR4 RAM
256GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD
The 4x4TB is actually in RAID 5 - I forgot it wasn’t RAID 0
I’m pretty much filling all 10TB of space on that array.
I have a 2TB SSD sitting around. It would be perfect for like the first 60 seconds of all my plex media!
My plex isn’t in use 24x7 so I don’t really want to turn off sleep on the HDD. I know that would fix the problem.
Like I said in the name of the thread, I would love it if plex had that feature. Each video that was in the media libraries could have the option for a certain percent or amount of video time to be on a separate location for instant access.
four 4tb drives in raid 5 is 12tb total, not 10. if you get nas drives, just let them spin 24x7, wont hurt nothin. also i3 is no bueno for transcoding, especially more than 1 stream remote.
@erik2282 you need to do some research at this point my friend. a 4Tb drive is actually roughly 3.63TB
Drives are marketed with the term TeraBytes, meaning 1 Trillion Bytes (1,000,000,000,000)
Computers don’t use TeraBytes they use TebiBytes which are 240 bytes (1,099,511,627,776)
multiply that by 4 and you get 14.52, then after formatting and 1 parody drive I have roughly 10.5TB worth of space.
Also, the 10th gen i3 that I’m using is able to at least stream 10 devices watching something different at 1080p, and at least 4 devices watching a 4k UHD 2160p video. I ran out of devices to test. Even at the 4k streaming on 4 devices, my CPU was at barely 40%.
Spinning up the drives shouldn’t differ where you are
As such I suspect transcode buffering as well, and that rules out your req, since depending on location and player used, different bandwith might be selected by the transcoder
