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Clouddrive + Drivepool + Plex


antigravity83

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Hey guys- 

 

Just started using Clouddrive and Drivepool to manage my storage for my Plex Server. Great software!

 

I'm hoping to get some expert advice on the best settings to use in both programs when streaming via Plex.

 

My setup is as follows:

 

Plex appdata is on physical C:\

I have unlimited upload/download quota's, with speeds of up to 1gbps.

 

1x Drivepool for Movies

1x Drivepool for TV Shows 

Each Drivepool is comprised of 2x Google Drive Clouddrives with 2x file duplication. 1 Clouddrive has 500GB cache, the other has 1GB cache and is purely in place for duplication purposes.

 

I currently have each clouddrive setup with 10/10 threads, with unlimited download (for when Plex downloads file for transcode) and 400mbps upload limit.

 

Clouddrives have the following prefetch settings:

Trigger : 1MB

Forward: 400MB

Time Windows: 1800 seconds

 

Drivepools are set up with realtime duplication and read striping. No Network I/O boost. Balancing is set for immediate.

 

Couple of questions:

1. Should I use Read Striping if only 1 Clouddrive per Drivepool has a decent size physical cache?

2. Should I use Network I/O Boost? I'll most likely be transcoding files in Plex, rather than streaming the files directly from the drive.

3. If each Drivepool is made up of 1x 500GB cache and 1x 1GB cache, will Drivepool automatically utilise a locally cached file instead of pulling one from the cloud on the second Clouddrive? Or am I better off creating 2x 250GB local cache's per Drivepool?

4. Will I lose disk read speeds with this setup? 

5. Any other advice on Prefetch or any other settings would be greatly appreciated :)

 

Thanks again!

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  1. Read striping reads from the faster/less busy disk, or it reads from both. It determins this at the time of access. So, leaving it enabled should be best. 
  2. In your case? No.  It adds additional CPU overhead, to prioritize network activity over local disk activity.  For your setup, it definitely isn't worth the trade off.
  3. If you have read striping enabled, it will likely resort to the 500GB cache drive, depending on the contents of the cache. In theory, accessing the new data would take longer, increasing the drive's latency, and cause the read striping feature to want to switch to the other drive (as long as it's not doing the same). 

    That said, a larger cache for both drives is the better option here. It means less going up to the cloud for data, but that also depends on usage. 

  4. Depends on what you mean. 

    But there is some additional overhead for using the CloudDrive disks, but this shouldn't be significant. 

  5. Set the Window to a lower value. 300 seconds should be better.  I'd also recommend a larger trigger value (like 10MB), that way, it's not overzealously downloading 400MB swaths of data.

    Also, when creating or mounting the drives, you may want to consider setting the "minimum download size", as this limits the smallest block of data  that the software will access.  Larger sizes means more data at once, but it means increased latency as it has to download the entire chunk. But with prefetching, that shouldn't affect you too much. 

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Thanks Chris for the advice, much appreciated :)

 

With prefetch settings:

 

- increase trigger to 10MB: would this cause any issues with library scanning as some library files/metadata are less than 10MB?

- decrease forward to 300MB: would this have any affect on buffering, either at the start of playing a file and during the playing of a file? I want to reduce the time it takes to start playing a file, and obviously midstream buffering.

 

Thanks again

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Does anyone use this in combination with Sonarr? Would like to hear from others experiences with it.

 

Curious to know if it's downloading the whole file when scanning it as this will throw a spanner into the works with my plan.

 

It seems to be crashing my plex and sonarr randomly. Still trying to work out the bugs but I think it's something to do with reading files that aren't completely uploaded yet.. IDK.. still trying to figure it all out.. but I can confirm that sonarr and plex have been crashing since I've been attempting to move to the cloud.

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Guys to correct a few things: 
 

  • Prefetch Trigger: This is the amount of data that needs to be read sequentially in order to trigger the prefetcher.
  • Prefetch Forward: Once prefetching is triggered, this is the amount of data that will be pre-downloaded ahead of the current read request.
  • Prefetch Time Window: This controls how quickly the sequential read requests have to occur in order to trigger the prefetcher.
For example, with the prefetch trigger set to 1 MB and the prefetch time window set to 30 seconds, if an application reads the first megabyte of a file sequentially, but it does so very slowly and takes longer than 30 seconds to do it, that won't trigger the prefetcher.
 
 
So, you want the time window to be on the smaller side, actually. 30s should be fine
 
 

 

Sorry you're right, my bad. Thanks for spotting that!

What affect would reducing the prefetch window have on streaming, either direct or transcoded?

 

Nope, it shouldn't affect it one way or another.  

 

 

It seems to be crashing my plex and sonarr randomly. Still trying to work out the bugs but I think it's something to do with reading files that aren't completely uploaded yet.. IDK.. still trying to figure it all out.. but I can confirm that sonarr and plex have been crashing since I've been attempting to move to the cloud.

 

It may be worth checking sonarr's logs.  It may indicate what the issue is 

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