I installed sickbeard using the .plg file as that seems to be the way to do it. I altered the .cfg file that's created in /boot/config/plugins/sickbeard so that it installs to my cache drive:

 

 

# sickbeard configuration

SERVICE="enable"

INSTALLDIR="/mnt/cache/.sickbeard"

DATADIR="/mnt/cache/.sickbeard"

RUNAS="nobody"

PORT="8081"

 

 

I assume there's nothing wrong with doing this? Anyway, it seems to have installed to an odd subdirectory "/mnt/cache/.sickbeard/midgetspy-Sick-Beard-2020a41". Now I assume that the stuff at the end is some kind of version number which would mean if I updated the plugin it would move to a different directory, so any script that referenced it wouldn't work properly.

 

So:

 

- Is there a way to stop this?

- Should I actually just keep the install dir as /usr/local/sickbeard, as it was by default, then keep the datadir as my cache drive? Is there any disadvantage to this? I don't want my config to reset every time I restart my server - when it says data dir I assumed it meant all changeable data, however it seems that there is a sickbeard "data" directory which wouldn't include the config.ini.

- Would there actually be anything wrong with setting both the install dir and the data dir to somewhere under my /boot directory? I don't know how intensive the application is on IO, but this would prevent the problem of it keeping the cache drive spun up.. It would also then mean that I didn't have to do a delayed start

 

EDIT: OK so I changed the directory to /mnt/cache/.custom/sickbeard which seemed to fix it. Couchpotato was doing the same thing as sickbeard so I did the same for that, however it still did the weird thing.. took a couple of goes to get it to install straight to the directory rather than some weirdly named subdirectory. However, I'm not marking it as closed just yet as I'm still curious as to if there's anything wrong with install them to the flash drive instead of the HDD, I can't imagine them doing much writing if you disable logging and obviously the initial hit when you get TV show info, but nothing out of the ordinary for a flash drive.

The db generates a lot of writes as well. Every time it makes a search or a backlog for each show and episode it will be written when and what results. If you you have one show with 1 season and 10 episodes, it's not going to generate a lot of writes, you're right.

 

On the other hand, if you have like 2000+ episodes it generates quite some writing activity.

 

The reason why it's generally not advised to write to the flash drive is not that is nothing out of the ordinary, but we all try here to single out possible causes of failure.

Thanks for your explanation, it was partially out of general curiosity and that was exactly what I was looking for.