Full File SSD Cache Suggestion

[mev 5]

Hi Folks,

I am a regular happy user of Emby and I love the product.
A feature I would love to see added if possible is a full file cache drive (SSD) for handling blu-ray's especially but I guess it would be an advantage for all video files.

I have noticed IOPS become a major issue when there are 2 movies being accessed from the same datastore drive and this seems to be resolved by shifting the files to SSD. In my own situation, given that I have a 30TB Datastore split among 6 rotary drives, replacing that with SSD would be crazy expensive.

What would help alot with IOPS bottlenecking is to have an option within Emby server that would allow for a full file cache SSD drive, which would essentially involve an alternate temporary file path for each movie and a script to copy the file to the specified drive location, and subsequently delete it when its no longer required.

EXAMPLE:

1. When a movie is selected for playing in Emby, select the full path of the file e.g.

<span class="mediaInfoAttribute">X:\movies\movietitle\movie.mkv</span>

2. Kick off a script (Powershell for example) to move the file across to the SSD full file cache drive which can be defined somewhere in the settings

e.g.
Copy-Item -Path X:\movies\movietitle\movie.mkv -Destination Y:\movies\movietitle\movie.mkv
Emby then populates the temporary file path, reads from SSD Y:\movies\movietitle\movie.mkv and continues as normal using the Y: SSD location as the movie file path

3. When Emby finishes with the movie, kick off a script (again Powershell for example)

Remove-Item –path Y:\movies\movietitle\movie.mkv
This clears the file from the SSD full file cache - You could also consider deleting the oldest first if its not a simple to determine when the file is no longer needed.


I would be quite happy to make my server available to you for testing such a solution if you feel its worthwhile adding it to Emby, and even more happy to help out on making Powershell scripts or VB.NET or C code if required.

Kind Regards,

M

Edited May 17, 2018 by mev