Hey All,

 

Thanks in advance for the answers/help. I've been watching/reading all that I can about the optimal Plex setup. It will be the main docker used for this server. 

 

I have 2 1TB NVMe drives for a planned pooled raid 0 cache

 

I guess I have five questions.

1. Combining Nvidia GPU & RAM for transcoding? I watched and see below for the specific comments I pulled:

 

Managed to combine this RAM technique with GPU transcoding enabled and has significantly sped things up. For anyone else wondering, to enable GPU transcoding (assuming you have an Nvidia card installed) you must first add the extra parameter "--runtime=nvidia" (without quotations) and then separated by a space from the RAM parameters/any other paramaters. You'll of course also need to have set up the appropriate drivers which you can find in Community Applications. A working config will look a little something like this "--runtime=nvidia --device=/dev/dri --mount type=tmpfs,destination=/tmp,tmpfs-size=20000000000 --no-healthcheck". This will still use your GPU to transcode but will instead offload that data to RAM instead of smashing your CPU and Cache resources. Happy homelab-ing! Edit: I should add that I have this tried and tested on linuxserver's repository but YMMV.

"--device=/dev/dri" is only for CPU transcoding. Since a recent update, the container will fail to spin up if you use this with GPU transcoding, so just remove it to get "--runtime=nvidia --mount type=tmpfs,destination=/tmp,tmpfs-size=20000000000 --no-healthcheck". And of course, adjust "tmpfs-size=xxxxxxxxxxx" to be appropriate for for how many bytes of RAM you're able to allocate in your server or you might exceed your total RAM which may lead to containers/vm's etc. starting to crash.

 

Is there a reason to combine Nvidia and RAM transcoding? I have 64GB of ECC and a P2000?

 

2. Hardlinking

Another cool looking video

 

Is this the better way to setup shares than what spaceinvader one has demonstrated in his general setup video? See question 4 below - will hardlinking conflict with this?

 

3. Cache & Plex- I must of read for hours regarding this. With 2 x 1TB NVMe drives is it better to dedicate one for Appdata and the other for Plex app data? I know I would lose parity but I would use CA Appdata Backup/Restore plugin for backing up both drives. Or is it better to keep it as RAID 0 and all files on the single cache?

 

4. Direct disk access 

 

Are there risks with this? It seems like it will really speed things up. 

 

5. All of my UHD/DVD backups are on a synology. When I move them over (through network copy past of a mounted drive), is it better to avoid using the cache in order to prevent unnecessary writes to the NVMe drives? Ie direct writes to the storage pool? Have about 10TB of data to move over. If the answer is yes; is there a simple way to do this (ie temporarily turning off the cache for the pool)? 

I read some users suggesting using a larger SSD as the target drive (unmounted drive plugin) and then move over to the pool?

 

Thanks again for all the help/suggestions

Hmmm...did I ask too many questions for a single thread?

 

@casperse @mgutt You guys posted a lot regarding my questions. I would greatly appreciate your opinion

I am curious as well to some of the questions you asked. Planning to upgrade my server over the holidays and planning to rebuild my unRAID from the ground up. Will be adding a Win11 VM to use as my daily driver but trying to figure out which GPU to use for VM vs unRAID, how to optimize my plex, etc. So much info out there LOL