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SSD caching Question


hammy

Question

Apologies here, this may have been asked before, but I don't quite have the hardware vocabulary to search for it appropriately. 

Does drivepool have the ability to do this:

  • I am currently using drivepool for my Plex server, but for whatever reason, I keep running into bottlenecks on my drive speeds. 
  • What I'd like to happen is when a movie or whatever starts being read from my spinning drives, to automatically transfer over to a caching SSD for faster reading
  • Is such a thing even possible, does it even make sense to ask in the context of a plex server (ie, is midstream handoff even a thing, again, sorry I'm still learning the hardware lingo)?

 

Thank you for the forums here, they've been a great help to me!

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On 11/7/2019 at 10:13 AM, hammy said:
  • I am currently using drivepool for my Plex server, but for whatever reason, I keep running into bottlenecks on my drive speeds. 

There shouldn't be any bottleneck here.  If you're not using duplication, then the I/O is being passed on directly to the underlying disks.  For duplicated data, if you have read striping enabled (default), then it is more complicated.  but at worst, you should still be getting the same performance as the underlying disk. 

The exception here is if you have an antivirus software installed on the system that isn't optimized well.  StableBit DrivePool will trigger the real time protection twice. Once for the pool drive, and once for each underlying disk.   So, this could cause overhead. 

Additionally, if you have the transcode temp directory on the pool, it can cause issues too.

On 11/7/2019 at 10:13 AM, hammy said:
  • What I'd like to happen is when a movie or whatever starts being read from my spinning drives, to automatically transfer over to a caching SSD for faster reading

Unfortunately, that's not possible.  StableBit DrivePool is a file based pooling solution, so there isn't a good way to do this. 

You can, however, install stuff like PrimoCache on the system to take advantage of that.  And I know that we have a number of customers that do precisely that. 

 

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18 hours ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

There shouldn't be any bottleneck here.  If you're not using duplication, then the I/O is being passed on directly to the underlying disks.  For duplicated data, if you have read striping enabled (default), then it is more complicated.  but at worst, you should still be getting the same performance as the underlying disk. 

The exception here is if you have an antivirus software installed on the system that isn't optimized well.  StableBit DrivePool will trigger the real time protection twice. Once for the pool drive, and once for each underlying disk.   So, this could cause overhead. 

Additionally, if you have the transcode temp directory on the pool, it can cause issues too.

Unfortunately, that's not possible.  StableBit DrivePool is a file based pooling solution, so there isn't a good way to do this. 

You can, however, install stuff like PrimoCache on the system to take advantage of that.  And I know that we have a number of customers that do precisely that. 

 

Thank you so much for the help! I'll check out PrimoCache, I do have read striping enabled and multiple duplicated copies. I also probably chose the wrong word in "bottleneck." It makes it sound like DrivePool is causing my issue, when I don't think it is. Something is causing a lot of buffering when watching stuff off my server and I really can't pin down what it is. 

Thank you for taking the time!!

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If you still have this issue, could you tell me if Plex reacts the same way for all files or only certain files? Which container are they in? Are you streaming locally and did you check if for some reason plex is not streaming over the internet? Which plex app on what kind of device are you using? 

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