April 4, 20251 yr Community Expert I am posting this here for anyone else that experiences this problem as something they can check. Problem: One disk, the one holding my tv share, would never spin down like the rest of my drives. Unraid was registering read activity on the drive. I downloaded the logs from Plex and noticed errors in the Plex Media Server.log related to transcoding. Essentially what had happened is that my transcode configuration in plex was set to use /transcode for temporary data... but that directory didn't exist in the linuxserver.io plex container. I had to add a path to map it /transcode to /tmp on the unraid host and the error went away (I have a lot of ram, would have used a cache share if I didnt) . I suspect that the default path for a new plex deployment would have put it somewhere in the appdata directory, however I was migrating from an older system so the transcode working directory was already stored in the plex database. Anyway, for some reason with the transcode path missing, it kept hitting the drive (but not registering a file read), then failing to start the transcode then trying again later. Just one other thing to look at if your struggling with a drive that won't spin down.
April 4, 20251 yr Community Expert A good place to start is by using the "File Activity" plugin to see what specific files are being accessed on the drives. Another thing to check is to see if any of your plex "appdata" is somehow on the disk because that itself could keep the disk active. Plex might also just be doing it's tasks like intro detection, file analysis, etc... Stop plex entirely and see if the disk stays spun down. Edited April 4, 20251 yr by MowMdown
April 24, 20251 yr Author Community Expert Sorry for the delay, didn't see your response until now. The problem was that there was no file activity for the plugin to report. It was purely a misconfiguration of the transcode path in plex that, for some reason, did not exist. I believe that plex was constantly trying to use the transcode temp directory to process a show on my tv share, and couldn't. It never actually read the show's file, but it must have been inspecting the directory or file attributes or something and keeping the drive active.
April 24, 20251 yr Community Expert On 4/4/2025 at 7:56 PM, MowMdown said: Another thing to check is to see if any of your plex "appdata" is somehow on the disk because that itself could keep the disk active. Check to see if any of the "default shares" have files on any array disks. That will keep them from spinning down. system share especially. https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/shares/user-shares/#default-shares
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