I have about 10TB of data on the unRAID server.  I am running SimpleFeatures, and have the cachedirs option enabled in the settings.  I'm not sure how to actually verify that it's running/working.  I suspect it might not be.

 

I believe the point of cachedirs is to constantly poll the drives to keep a current list of directories in memory, so that when I browse directories from within Windows, the information will be available quickly, even with the drives spun down.

 

However, if I wake my desktop windows machine from sleep (and and the unRAID drives are spun down) then try to browse directories, it stalls for a long while (10-30 seconds) before it will show me subdirectories under any main user share.  Once it does find the directories, future browsing is plenty fast for that session.

 

Perhaps my expectations are incorrect, but I'd like to eliminate this lag, if possible.

If windows explorer is showing thumbnails or previews of the files, it will need to spin up the disk to provide these.  I believe if you display your files in list view this will not be the case.

Thanks for the prompt response. 

 

That's interesting, and makes sense, I'll test that later tonight.  Sadly, that would cause my real concern to continue, which is that when my media player tries to connect, it lags before it can continue, and there's no way for it to not try to get previews.

 

 

Well if your media player plays previews for every movie, there's not much you can do about this, except to put all the drives containing the content in a spin up group, so that when you connect to the content all the drives spin up together.  This way when you're browsing the media you won't have to wait for drives to spin up.

 

 

Yeah, I'm not actually sure what it polls for.  It's JRiver Media Center 18, and I'm posting on their forum right now for more information.

 

I believe it will normally look for the FILENAME.jpg for any media to display the cover art for me, so I suspect this is going to force the discs active.

 

I know there is some functionality build into the SimpleFeatures sleep command that I can use to force the server awake when any machine connects.  I wonder if this can be adapted to force/keep the discs awake also/instead.

 

I will try spin up groups also.  I guess I'll just need to pick my poison on this one.  I either get to save some power usage by letting them spin down, and suffer lag, or pay the extra power/wear/tear and not suffer the lag.  I suspect I'll may more to avoid the frustration

 

Thanks again.

If the media center has no way of locally caching the jpg files, it will indeed need to spin up the drives to show those pictures.