November 15, 20178 yr Hi guys, apologies if this has already been asked but I'm either not being able to find it or keep seeing contradicting facts. I hope you can help sort me out. Existing Setup: 16gb sony flash drive with boot file dual xeon setup, 16gb ram 4tb drive (1) - parity 3tb drive (3) - files Not yet connected: 4tb drive (2) - has original files, still testing unraid Dockers: plex, krusader, plexpy, (going to install sonarr, sab, couch, etc) Questions: 1. Cache drive: I don't have one, but I read that having one makes a huge difference. It stops the hard drives from all spinning up when plex is being browsed or watched, also if you're using dockers like sab. Basically, less wear on the system. However, I have a couple of 1tb hdd lying around doing nothing, the youngest being at 2100 hours on. I was thinking of putting this in if it'll help with the way I use my system. Or is going to slow me down and if I"m going to do a cache, stick with a ssd. 2. Current setup: Allocation method is high water and split level is automatically split as required. My logic with this was if I lose a drive, I've only lost some of the data and it would be easier to recover with parity, as opposed to having all seasons on a single drive. Is this correct? 3. Should I add another parity drive? If so, my system would look like: 4tb (2) - parity; 3tb (3), 4tb (1) - files. Or is this overkill? I do plan on adding more 3 or 4tb drives as needed. 4. Is there any benefit of backing up my boot drive? I currently have no backup and the existing usb drive is at least 5 years old (although flash drives are supposed to be good for decades). Thanks in advance for any advice given, its greatly appreciated. I have no issues rebuilding my system if needed, mainly because I still have the original files on those 4 tb drives I haven't yet connected.
November 15, 20178 yr Community Expert 7 minutes ago, bbyf16 said: Questions: 1. Cache drive: I don't have one, but I read that having one makes a huge difference. It stops the hard drives from all spinning up when plex is being browsed or watched, also if you're using dockers like sab. Basically, less wear on the system. However, I have a couple of 1tb hdd lying around doing nothing, the youngest being at 2100 hours on. I was thinking of putting this in if it'll help with the way I use my system. Or is going to slow me down and if I"m going to do a cache, stick with a ssd. It's helpful especially if you thrown on an SSD as the cache. If you house your dockers on it vs a typical HDD they will load much faster. I also recommend storing your appdata share on the cache as well. You'll really notice that the plex metadata will load extremely fast when browsing on your client devices. you won't be waiting for plex to load movie posters and everything else that is stored in the metadata. Since you have 16GB RAM I also recommend transcoding to memory vs a disk. Create a new path in the plex container settings set the host path to: /tmp set the container path to: /transcode go into the plex server settings, find the Transcode tab, click "Show Advanced" and type in the field: /transcode hit save and its done.
November 16, 20178 yr Author 35 minutes ago, MowMdown said: I also recommend storing your appdata share on the cache as well. You'll really notice that the plex metadata will load extremely fast when browsing on your client devices. you won't be waiting for plex to load movie posters and everything else that is stored in the metadata. 2 - how big of a ssd would I need? assume I eventually get to 16tb of data? What if I decide to do thumbnails as well? 35 minutes ago, MowMdown said: Since you have 16GB RAM I also recommend transcoding to memory vs a disk. Create a new path in the plex container settings set the host path to: /tmp set the container path to: /transcode go into the plex server settings, find the Transcode tab, click "Show Advanced" and type in the field: /transcode hit save and its done. -I'll try this now, see how it goes. Thanks for the tip.
November 16, 20178 yr Community Expert @bbyf16 I've been running fine on a 250GB SSD. I still have over 200GB free so I don't see that size being an issue.
November 16, 20178 yr Honestly and I do mean honestly. SSD is a must for Dockers and Plex. It helps things move very fast and since Plex does a lot of Caching and data seeking it can seriously speed up your experience. You can pickup SSD's for around $80US and they really help. As well like mentioned all of your app data is stored on your SSD and can be backed up.
November 16, 20178 yr Author thanks for the tips. Any ideas on whether I need more than 4tb parity or dual parity drives and folder splitting.
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