Hello, I'm running Plex on unRAID. When my HDD is in sleep mode, and I want to play something, Plex doesn't wait long enough for the HDD to spin up and instead throws an error. Is there a setting where I can adjust this timeout?

Next to the server, I can clearly hear when the HDD is spinning up. And in about 50% of the trials it works w/o errors.

Thanks in advance 

This is a question which is better asked in the Plex forums.

 

It is an annoying problem, especially when other less tech savvy users are trying to play media.  Unfortunately, adjusting the time out to wait for playback is done on the client side, not the server.  So unless Plex codes in some sort of signal in their server code and code for all of their clients (and all of them are fully updated with this, no small feat) that passes a "wait a bit longer", there is little to fix this.

 

If you search around this forum, some folks have tried scripts that put the beginning of every/most media in memory, or cache most recently added media to a faster SSD drive.  I looked at this, but each has its drawbacks.

 

What I do is keep all of my media on a couple of drives which never spin down.  I set up share exclusions so only media goes to these drives and everything else only goes to the rest of the drives on my array.  This also has its drawbacks, but I find it the lesser of evils.

That's really odd, I've never had an issue with plex starting media from a spun-down disk.

May depend on several factors:  The Plex client; time it takes for a server to go from data request until drive is spun up and ready; the data path between the server and the Plex client.  I knew exactly what @Lemming was referring to when I saw this post, as I had issues with it both on my Apple4K on my home LAN (video) as well as my iPhone on the road (music).  I forget the exact message, as I have been using my media disks always spun up for a couple of years, and haven't seen it since.  Vaguely remember it as an "Unexpected error..." message, then the client being ornery about recovering and retrying.

 

Here are the two threads where folks were trying different things to circumvent the delay:

 

 

 

 

Note that I am not maintaining my script above anymore, as the new version of mover tuning now supports "age moving" similar to what my script above did. 

@Terebi - Thanks for the update.  I just referenced the two threads above as examples of what extent and methods people have tried to address drive spin up latency and its impact to media servers.

 

The Mover Tuning plugin seems to have its issues as well lately, from what I see reading the forum.