Best solution for long term seeding?

[Pulteney]

Been planning out my Unraid build for the last couple of days, and one of the challenges I still have is how I will handle long term seeding. I am a member some private trackers where I want to seed a lot of data for basically forever.

Almost all of my torrent downloads will be handled by *arrs and qbittorrent. Ideally I want this to be 100% automated.

 

Before getting into the details, I'm curious how you all handle Plex libraries with cache drives involved:

Do you add multiple sources (cache and array) and activate Plex's automatic thrash setting for when cache files are removed?

Do you simply wait for the new media to be moved to the array by Mover before its accessible in Plex?

From what I've found so far, long term seeding will be difficult to automate using a smaller NVME cache drive.

I'm looking at these three solutions to my problem, all with various drawbacks:

NVME Cache for downloads:

1. Will fill up quickly

2. Hardlink doesn't work across drives/arrays.

3. Mover wont be able to move files that are in use by qbittorrent, and even if it was (by temporarily stopping qbittorrent), there's no way Unraid/Mover can tell qbittorrent about their new location to continue seeding.

 

Dedicated HDD (10TB-ish) for downloads:

1. Hardlink doesn't work across drives/arrays.

2. Can use copy instead of hardlinks in *arr settings to copy all downloaded files to array when completed. This would cause the array to spin up every time a torrent has downloaded.

3. Will have to delete torrents or add drives if the array fills up

4. Adds extra cost, especially if I want more drives and/or parity

- Does Unraid have a copy feature similar to Mover? This way files could be copied to the array once per night instead of when every download finishes.

 

Download directly to main array and seed from there:

1. One or more drives will almost always be spun up.

2. Might cause performance problems if there's a lot of torrent traffic going on while many users are using Plex. But unlikely?

3. From what I've read, parity drives are not used when simply reading from the array, so that's good.

 

 

All in all I'm actually leaning towards the last option. I don't think performance will be an issue, as I currently have 750Mbit connection. Far below the drives capacity.

Note, I still haven't actually used Unraid, so I might have misunderstood some things here. Is there an obvious solution to my problem that I'm not seeing?

[trurl]

Don't think of array and cache separately. Cache and array are both included in user shares. Just work with user shares and everything will look the same whether files are on cache or array. 

 

[Pulteney]

On 1/12/2023 at 12:46 PM, trurl said:

Don't think of array and cache separately. Cache and array are both included in user shares. Just work with user shares and everything will look the same whether files are on cache or array. 

 

Thank you. It all made sense when I actually started using unraid. Pretty sleek.