Does anyone here know in detail how the Download feature works on server side?
Asking because I am having a small System partition and do not want to get it to overflow. So question is:
When someone downloads a File which is not in original quality, what does Plex do? will the system partition on which Plex runs be used for converting the file and therefor uses temp. space or does Plex an “on the fly” transcoding of the file and does not use any storage in large numbers on System Partition while converting the file? I have Transcoder Directory on an external SSD…
It uses the “transcoder directory” for downloads as well. So that won’t pose a problem.
What you need to be wary about is the various “analysis” jobs that take place upon media addition and/or during server maintenance. Because these are using the general temp folder of the operating system.
Which I think is located on the primary hard drive on Mac as well.
Since I have no clue whether this temp folder can be relocated, you should consider freeing up space on your primary hard drive.
The first thing that comes to mind is relocating the whole Plex data folder. This can free up a considerable amount of storage, depending on the size of your media collection.
How to do that on Mac is unfortunately not my area of expertise.
Last thing I remember was to use some kind of symbolic link.
Searching on these very forums should give you a clue about that.
EDIT: Just checked the free amount of Disk Space: I have over 150GB of free space left. Do you think that should be sufficient for maintenance tasks? So far Plex is running for over two years now in that config and I never had any problems so far… I don’t intend to use more disk space on that partition for anything so the space left is only used by Plex… I am aware that the Plex data directory uses a lot of space but I’m a little bit concerned of moving the directory because it could go wrong…
