An idea

[swells]

I'm putting this in the lounge because i'm not sure where else to put it. Also, please don't take any of this as a complaint, none of this is is intended as such.

 

I, like many others here, primarily use my unRAID server for media. I run Plex with Sonarr and SABnzbd for my media management. I love the setup and the ability to add a show and never have to manage it again, assuming everything continues to run the way it is intended without any hiccups, which is usually does. I also, do not have cable tv, i cut the cord a long time ago and love it. That's the background.

 

One of the small things I notice when watching media on Plex is there is a noticeable delay when loading something that has recently downloaded and not yet moved to the array and is on the cache drive, vs something on the array and the disk has to spin up, etc. Now this is where my first paragraph comes into play. This amount of time is a few seconds probably and is not a big deal. But it is noticeable, as is the seek time if I want to skip around in the episode or movie. Obviously in the past getting stuff off of the cache drive quickly in order to get it protected was desirable. But now with the cache pool feature, this may have changed some. I have not yet implemented a cache pool myself and currently use a 850 EVO as my cache disk. From what I have read here, there are a few options with the BTRFS cache pool. Please correct me if i am wrong but, RAID1, RAID10, and RAID5?

 

My initial idea was to use a RAID5 setup for the cache pool. Then I could set my media folders to be ignored by the default mover script so they would stay on the cache drive. I could create a custom mover to check the watched status of the media in the plex database and move the file to the array if it has been watched, or leave it otherwise. I have not played with this idea yet, I don't even know if it would work or if it is a waste of time, just an idea. Also, this gets more complicated when you add additional users, and I share my Plex with a half dozen or so people.

 

The next idea was to do the same thing basically only have it based on when the media was added to the library. So maybe Added + x number of days. So maybe 30 days of Media stays on cache?

 

Again, I don't even know if this is possible? Worth it? Dumb idea? Just something I was thinking about.

[wes862]

I have the same question about the btrfs cache.

 

[trurl]

Search for "accelerator drive". See search tips in my sig.

[HellDiverUK]

I'm a little confused why you're having issues with delays in starting videos in Plex.  The only time I have a delay is when my videos are on a spun-down disk.  When the videos are on the cache, play starts immediately.

 

My videos tend to download between 2am to 5am, so I have my Mover scheduler set to move my videos to the array at 1am.  This way, my evening's viewing tend to come off the cache drive, which as I said is instant.

[swells]

Search for "accelerator drive". See search tips in my sig.

 

Thank you! This is pretty much exactly what I am thinking.

 

I'm a little confused why you're having issues with delays in starting videos in Plex.  The only time I have a delay is when my videos are on a spun-down disk.  When the videos are on the cache, play starts immediately.

 

My videos tend to download between 2am to 5am, so I have my Mover scheduler set to move my videos to the array at 1am.  This way, my evening's viewing tend to come off the cache drive, which as I said is instant.

 

Yeah, the same situation applied for me. However, most of the time I do not watch the shows the night they air. So for example GoT is on at 10PM EST. I get it downloaded around 11:30PM EST. It moves to a disk and is spun down when I go to watch it, I notice this delay. Obviously given the protection offered by btrfs cache pools now, an easy solution to this is simply to change my mover settings to every other day? Or maybe even a week depending on how big of a cache pool I had. That would solve this pretty easily.

[spencers]

I too am slightly inconvenienced by waiting for drives to spin up for recent media. But only slightly!

 

One option I can think of is to set the mover to run less frequently, perhaps weekly on an off-day that works best for your favorite shows airing schedules. That does compromise your data, since it would be sitting on your cache drive longer and not parity protected followed by taking up costly precious SSD space.

[kizer]

When you say you have to wait because of the delay you talking minutes or seconds? When I click a video using Kodi aka XBMC I normally wait what "feels like" 5 seconds on a spun down disc. To me the 3-5 seconds feels reasonable seeing it had to spin up  disc.

[bkastner]

You other option, which would not require any change in hardware is to disable spin-down on the drive(s) that your media typically sits on. For most the power savings of spinning down the disks is worth the 3-5 second delay for the first show on a spun-down drive, but if it's that annoying for you, maybe leaving the drive spinning all the time is the way to go. I would think this is a way easier/cheaper solution to give you instant access to your content. you could even have all new media go to a single drive so you would only need to have that one spinning, and let the ones with older content spin down as normal.

[swells]

I too am slightly inconvenienced by waiting for drives to spin up for recent media. But only slightly!

 

One option I can think of is to set the mover to run less frequently, perhaps weekly on an off-day that works best for your favorite shows airing schedules. That does compromise your data, since it would be sitting on your cache drive longer and not parity protected followed by taking up costly precious SSD space.

 

Right. I mentioned that in my last reply. I can change the default mover script to run less often, that would help. And with cache pools being protected, that would solve the problem with potential for data loss.

 

When you say you have to wait because of the delay you talking minutes or seconds? When I click a video using Kodi aka XBMC I normally wait what "feels like" 5 seconds on a spun down disc. To me the 3-5 seconds feels reasonable seeing it had to spin up  disc.

 

You are also correct, the amount of time is very very small. A few seconds only. This is why in my original post I tried to make it clear that I wasn't really complaining, I am very happy with unRAID, Plex, and my overall experience with everything. I have no problem waiting those few seconds for a disk to spin up. I was just thinking of something cool to do with some of the new features that have been added to unRAID recently.

 

I only recently (past 6 months or so) switched from a 2TB 7200rpm drive for my cache disk to an SSD. The difference this made with my apps like Plex was absolutely incredible. The amount of time it takes to load the metadata is night and day, especially on the smaller libraries. Seeing that difference is what got me thinking about other small changes that could be done to speed up the experience just enough to notice. My Movies library still is pretty sluggish when scrolling down through stuff further down in it. I think its somewhere around ~2k movies now. I probably should break it up to make it faster. I still dont fully understand how btrfs cache pools deal with the data, so trying to figure that out fully before i decide if i want to do it. If it stripes data like a traditional raid5, maybe that would help a bit with this. But thats a different topic.

 

 

[kizer]

I didn't think you was complaining just figured I'd ask to make sure I understood your dislike. lol

You could change you default or simply change the spin down of each drive differently too. The drives I write to often I've in the past changed their spin down times to 4hours and the ones that I don't access often to 1-2 hours because I don't really need them on if I'm not using them.

 

If I recall I think you can change the amount of storage on your Cache to fire off the Mover script too. Unless I'm thinking of something else.

 

I don't personally use the mover script, but I do store copies of things on my SSD that I often convert for Ipad friendly file formats and the instant access or lack of needing to wake up my other drives is kinda of nice.