Spin up all drives on specific file type access


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One of my servers is dedicated to media (movies) with all of them catalogued with Ember Media Manager and only one share on my server with 20 data drives allocated to the share.

 

If I use spin up groups, all the drives will stay spun up whilst I watch a 2 hour long movie.

 

If I don’t use spin up groups, one drive at a time will spin up as Ember Media Manager retrieves the NFO file and JPG files to display in the catalogue.  It can take 10 minutes or more as I scroll from movie to movie for the first 20 movies or so in the Ember Catalogue with long delays when the files are on spun down disks.

 

A great feature would be all drives in the share accessed to be spun up on accessing (say) the NFO or JPG file and then whilst I’m actually watching the movie, typically an MKV file, the other drives would be spun down on the preset spin down delay.

 

Currently I work round this by using spin up groups and copying the movie I want to watch to my HTPC, but it’s a pain with some 4K movies being 70GB or larger.

 

 

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I can’t think of an easy way to do what you suggest.    The file system handling runs at a level that is not aware of whether drives are spun up or not.  Spinning up drives runs much closer to the hardware level (if it is not relying on the hardware itself to spin up drives on access) and is not aware of why an access to a disk is being made.
 

Be nice to be proved wrong and that such a feature IS practical.

 

One suggestion might be to have smaller spin-up groups (of something like 4-5 drives).    This does not solve the base problem but might be better than using no groups at all.

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Is there not an option to store this metadata on a separate drive?

You could grab a 120GB drive for maybe $20 or something and throw all the images and the like on that.

 

To me this sounds like quite a rare use-case, as most media front-ends have options to store metadata on a different path for exactly this reason. Still, an interesting request.

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