I have tired the plex forums and haven't had much luck.  I think the issue is most likely happening when a drive is spun down and plex rescans the media it thinks its gone so it removes it from the plex library.  If I go in and manually force a scan several times it eventually picks up all the media.  I am currently running unraid 5.05 and Plex is running on a separate VM (ubuntu) on ESX host accessing the media over an NFS mount.  I didn't have the issues with plex loosing the media when I was running it on unraid directly but I moved it off so I could have more transcoding horsepower.

 

Has anyone experienced issues with Plex finding and then having the movies disappear then finding it again?  It's treating the media like it is brand new then re downloading cover art and everything.    Let me know what I can provide to figure this out. 

 

Thanks,   

This may have something to do with the trash emptying settings. If you go into the server settings there should be an option to empty trash after a scan. Turn this off and you may find that the unwanted behavior stops. This setting allows for drives that may, or may not be, online all the time.

Thanks for the reply.  I unchecked that option and will see what happens.  I'm not sure if this is a new setting or just something overlooked when I moved my Plex install off my Unraid box. 

CacheDirs may also help you.  It keeps dir entries cached, so the drive can spin down but the dir entries are instantly available.  Make sure after installing it that you include only the folders that Plex needs to see.

Well, turning off the trash seemed to help.  Now I can see that a clump of files are unavailable after awhile.  I don't know that caching it will really help if the disk is actually unavailable. I'll try it... it's possible that caching will keep plex from loosing it and then enable unraid to spin up when the file is played.  I'll try and check next time the files go missing to see if it is tied to a particular disk since not all the media goes missing.  Very weird.