Hey,  I find that when i am browsing a share, lets say the movies folder via kodi, it spins up all drives with the movies folder to load up the index.

 

Is there any reason that the file listing is not cached in memory or at least on the cache disk to avoid unnecessary disk spin-up?  Wouldn't it be better to spin up the disk when an actual file read is issued?

 

Potentially I'm not understanding how unraid is working, but when I browse a movie share then check the unraid gui I see a green ball next to all the drives that provide that share and that wasn't what i was expecting until I perform a read.

If the file browser was just showing the file entries, and therefore ONLY using the directory entries, then yes, they should be cached.  The problem is, many fancier file browsers, especially for media files, will 'enhance' the view with metadata info, such as freshly generated thumbnails, how many minutes, what resolution, etc.  For that, the file is opened to get that metadata or movie frames, and that causes the drive spinup.  Try searching for such features and turning them off.

If you have plenty of spare RAM on your server it is worth installing the cache_dirs plugin to improve the chances of the recant directory entries already being in RAM when you try the listing.

Okay so its potentially an application action? This is specifically Kodi, do you know if there's an unraid friendly setting?

 

@ram, good call, my new build will have plenty of ram so I will take a look at that.