[Plugin] HeadStart — Instant NVMe Preloader for Plex, Jellyfin & Emby

HeadStart is a free, open-source NVMe/SSD preloader plugin for Unraid (6.12+ / 7.x) and Linux media servers running Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby.

It lets you keep your Unraid parity array spun down 23 hours a day while starting 4K Remuxes and high-bitrate media in ~0.3 seconds instead of waiting 8–15 seconds for hard drives to spin up.

Links & Installation

• Plugin URL (Unraid WebGUI → Plugins → Install Plugin):
  https://www.deadstick.net/headstart/headstart.plg
  

• 1-Line Terminal Installer:
  curl -fsSL https://www.deadstick.net/headstart/install.sh | bash
  

• Overview & Docs: https://www.deadstick.net/headstart/

• Support & Troubleshooting: https://www.deadstick.net/headstart/support/

• GitHub Repository (Source & Releases): https://github.com/chanceneel/headstart

How It Works

1. Smart Library Harvesting: HeadStart reads your Plex SQLite database in strictly read-only mode or scans your media folders for Jellyfin/Emby, prioritizing On Deck / Continue Watching, Recently Added, TV Season Premieres, and Movies.

2. Head + Tail NVMe Preload: For each prioritized file, HeadStart caches the opening ~30 seconds (bitrate-aware) plus the final 256 KiB container footer on your NVMe/cache pool. Every chunk is verified with a 64-bit FNV-1a checksum.

3. Authoritative Per-Disk RAM Catalog: HeadStart maintains a complete per-disk directory & attribute catalog across all array disks and pools, plus real-time watchers on awake disks. Library scans, directory listings, and probes are answered from RAM without spinning up sleeping disks—and uncached media is never hidden.

4. Zero-Restart Container Attachment & Seamless Handoff: HeadStart attaches a read-only FUSE layer into your media server container namespace with zero container restart. When you press Play, the first 30 seconds stream immediately from NVMe while HeadStart wakes only the single target HDD in the background and hands off the file descriptor at the exact byte offset.

5. Automatic Free-Space Floor & Fail-Safe Watchdog: Automatically yields preload space whenever your cache pool drops below your configured free-space floor (default 500 GiB), and automatically detaches the overlay if the daemon ever stops so your media server falls back to its native Unraid mount.

Requirements

• Unraid 6.12.0+ or 7.x

• An SSD/NVMe cache pool for the preload store

• Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby Docker container

Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome in this thread!

Edited 46 minutes ago46 min by FlyingTexan