Actually i did mention what the issue is already. People just don’t like to read it seems. Suggesting i run a ramdisk when there are several of my posts above discussing the ramdisk i previously ran is evidence of that as well.
This thread isn’t about my media playback issues. If you want the details of that, go read my unanswered threads from months ago. I’ve posted in detail about the issue already, and it was a deadend. I get no solutions here. I only made the current thread to find out if anyone was running an SSD transcode disc and to find out how long their SSDs were lasting.
Nothing is pointing specifically at drive failure. But I’m transcoding to SSDs, so drive failure is inevitable when the cells are used up and unable to be rewritten. The fact that certain media files would work on a client one day, then refuse to play the next and ever day after that made me think it might be drive failure. That said, drive failure of the transcoding drive shouldn’t discriminate by file, which is what I’m experiencing. Im not going to go over all this again, because I’ve written this all out in detail in other threads, but one example is dark night rises, which i tried testing with today. I have this in 4k HDR HEVC.
The degradation of the media was as follows:
it played fine on all clients
it started skipping on my wife’s Samsung Galaxy tab A7
i replaced my wife’s A7 with a newer Samsung 8.4" tablet, and it played fine
it started skipping on the Samsung 8.4" tablet
it completely stopped loading at all on the 8.4" tablet
it stopped loading at all on my wife’s office TV (LG 4k using a 4k fire stick) and on her pixel 4a 5g
That last status is where things stand with that particular media file.
To be clear, dark night rises plays perfectly fine on our nvidia shield, my Galaxy tab a10.1, my PMS machine, my pixel 4a 5g that i bought at the same time as hers, and basically any other TV or firestick in the house.
Now before you get on my case about h265, we have this issue with a bunch of different media files now, and not all are hevc. Not to mention, some of the “problematic” clients DEFINITELY support h265. Similarly, not all are 4k. My wife has the Pretty Little Liars series in 1080p, and that very recently stopped playing on her tablet and phone. It’s always played fine on both for years. I haven’t even touched my library or PMS configuration in a long time, so any sudden changes must be due to server firmware upgrades.
I’ve been trying to troubleshoot this for like a freaking year now, and I’ve basically given up. I basically chalked it up to incompetent programmers at Plex. There are no indications of a problem with my PMS or network, and I’ve spent hours upon hours combing through every single Plex configuration imaginable to no avail. It began out of the blue, and there’s apparently no fix either.
Yeah it’s pretty annoying when people are lazy and just scroll to the bottom of a post without reading literally anything in it. Gets really old having to repeat yourself for lazy people who just want to post nonsense.
No, i never asked you to try to solve the media degradation issue. That’s not what this thread is about. You just decided to make it about that and are now throwing a tantrum because i called out your lazy ass. I don’t want your help. Goodbye.
Let’s curb it down a notch. People are trying to answer your question and ask questions to understand what you’re actually trying to achieve. Currently I only see one person in this thread being actively hostile.
SSDs have a limited R/W which wears overtime, and ultimately die.
It’s better to setup a ramdisk if you have enough ram (much faster IO than SSDs and I see that you have plenty of RAM which runs at a fairly good frequency) and then transcode from there and keep SSD for thumbnails / metadata
I did in the past setup SSD transcoding but ultimately found out that it’s not really worth, since transcoding is done in very small chuncks and ssd performances aren’t good when it comes to write small files continuously. For few transcodes it’s good but the higher transcodes sessions the worse it’ll gets.
No, people are just scrolling to the bottom of the thread and mashing the keyboard without actually reading anything. Case in point: the post directly below yours. I’m not even asking for help in troubleshooting the media playback issue, and now I’m having to rehash everything I’ve already gone over with ever new poster so i can deliver it to them personally on a silver platter? No thanks. People need to learn to read. The information is literally in this thread if you just scroll up and read the damn thread. It’s not even a long thread at all. It takes 2 minutes to read tops. But ultimately my original question was about using an SSD for transcoding, not about troubleshooting the media issues. As I’ve already stated, I’ve been down that road already, I’m not going through it all over again. If anyone wants to read the details about my media playback issues or the troubleshooting I’ve done, they can look at my other threads. I just wanted to know about hard drives here. That is all.
In that case read all those posts as “no, I’m not running a dedicated SSD for Plex transcoding” with an attempt to give you some guidance (e.g. on how to approach the RAMdisk option which you apparently didn’t get to work as expected but which is from a technical standpoint the better alternative).
They were also answering your implied question if a HDD can do that job (yes, it can… even HDDs should have more throughput than most local networks unless you’ve setup a 10 Gbps network / SAN).
In order to answer your actual question (“how long will a SSD based transcode setup last?”) depends on the actual SSD. Vendors sell different qualities with different read/write cycles; there’s also some dependency on the controller. TL;DR: it’s hard to answer without knowing the specific product.
There’s always interesting reads on backblaze’s homepage (aside of their quarterly/yearly reliability reports) – e.g. Are Solid State Drives / SSDs More Reliable Than HDDs?
Not saying you’re not allowed to expect more confirmative replies… just saying you shouldn’t roast others for not complying with that implied expectation.
Save the lecture. Next time just read the entire thread before posting, instead of making assumptions. I’m not going to spoonfeed everyone from this twitter generation. If i can read, so can everyone else. And it’s ridiculous how many people in this thread have suggested i setup a RAMdisk like it’s something I’d never thought of before. I discuss previously using a RAMdisk in the first paragraph of the original post…
It should have been readily apparent by my previous posts (especially my original post) that I’m quite familiar with how SSDs work and the reasons why it’s not ideal to use them for this use case. But I’m not looking for anyone’s opinion on why I shouldn’t use an SSD or what is a better alternative. I specifically asked for real world feedback on SSD life from those who have run SSDs for transcoding drives. That’s a very targeted question, which should illicit specific, albeit few, answers. I only provided the summary details about my media playback issues for background and context, not to derail the thread into a completely different topic, the likes of which I’ve been through numerous times already.
This thread is specifically geared toward your media degradation issue in which you think two cheap M2 drives are at fault so YES that is what YOU made it sound like.
You run a separate Raid 5 array already so if you switch your transcoding directory to the array you will have PLENTY of disk speed to transcode ANYTHING thus eliminating the issue of so called bad M2.
We don’t even know what “media degradation” is because it could be many many things. You fail to explain exactly what is going on until way later in the thread.
We need client/server DEBUG logs while the problems are happening and any relevant errors that pop up on the screen along with what transcoder options you have enabled with what drivers if using HW.
You mentioned 4k movies and Wifi which isn’t going to work reliably. Especially if the server AND the client are ON THE SAME WIFI AP.
Therefore we are grasping at straws trying to help you only to be given an ATTITUDE. Nobody will help you acting like this.
It’s been suggested by a number of people that Plex is coded rather inefficiently, causing excessive reading/writing to the transcoding drive and subsequent premature drive failure. This of course is somewhat anecdotal, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least based on what I’ve seen from the Plex Dev team over the years.
As to my specific usage, it would be a bit harder to run the numbers as the server is largely used by my wife. But she watches movies and TV shows all day every day, so assuming the equivalent of watching 10-4k movies worth of data per day isn’t at all unrealistic. I’d have to pull up the specs on the M.2 drives i am running, but i can guarantee you they aren’t spec’d as high as a Samsung Evo. These were $22 M.2 128GB SSDs. I’d expect them to die quicker than any respectable brand. That said, running them in Raid 0 should theoretically double the transcoding drive life.
I was merely entertaining the possibility at the beginning of this thread that these drives may have failed already, because i didn’t have any drive health information for them and i was anticipating failure with their use case anyway. Now it seems unlikely that drive failure is the issue at all. So really, there’s not even any point in continuing this thread since I’ve already determined that replacing the transcoding drive with another won’t resolve any of my issues.
