Archiving to offline disks

[rbjtech 5284]

Hi All,

So I've come to the realisation that I have all my media online, when only about 1-2% of it is actually used.   This is a huge waste of power spinning the disks, indexing etc so I throught I would look into offlining as much as possible and bring it online when (if) actually needed.

Boy was that fun (not) getting the disks to 'sleep' under Windows 11 - in short, you need to offline them first and then they will sleep.   All doable via powershell, so that's fine.

STRM files linking to the offline disk works ok in emby - the interesting bit is hooking into the playback request to then fire a powershell command to wake that disk with the file.   I wish emby has an 'offline' flag but I'm going to have to use an item rename and/or tag for the time being.

I tried to use DrivePool for the archive pool - but that doesn't work at all - as it reports disks are missing (as I only want to wake the relevant disk).   So for achive, individual disk mapping is unfortunately required.

Before I go down the rabbit hole of scripting/coding this (maybe with a plugin), has anybody else looked every looked into this - i couldn't find any detail with an Emby Search ..

Thanks !

[vincen 71]

Hi

 

Not sure it's a great idea sorry, as disks that you are going to repeteadly wake/sleep are going to die prematurely I think

 

Vincèn

[rbjtech 5284]

12 minutes ago, vincen said:

Hi

 

Not sure it's a great idea sorry, as disks that you are going to repeteadly wake/sleep are going to die prematurely I think

 

Vincèn

If I was doing this on my main disk pool - then yes - but maybe you missed the key reason - and that is for very infrequently used media (if at all - maybe NEVER opened or once or twice in the last 5 years etc) then THAT media would be archieved (but 'accessable' on emby).

For current stuff (ongoing shows etc) then the plan is to keep that on 24x7 spinning disk (just a lot less of it - hopefully a single disk) and maybe even copy it to SSD as the 'top tier' storage level for 'new' movies or 'being watched' TV shows.

Edited January 1, 2025 by rbjtech

[Neminem 1518]

I used a NAS for this, when I used windows and drivepool.

Had the same issue as you.

And set the NAS to sleep / Hibernate when idle.

It did take sometime to wake it, but it worked fine for those media files, that we never or rarely used.

I'm now on unRaid where my individual disk sleep after 30 min of no activity.

So retired my NAS.

 

[vincen 71]

12 hours ago, rbjtech said:

but maybe you missed the key reason - and that is for very infrequently used media (if at all - maybe NEVER opened or once or twice in the last 5 years etc) then THAT media would be archieved (but 'accessable' on emby).

For current stuff (ongoing shows etc) then the plan is to keep that on 24x7 spinning disk (just a lot less of it - hopefully a single disk) and maybe even copy it to SSD as the 'top tier' storage level for 'new' movies or 'being watched' TV shows.

Thanks for the details and yep makes very much sense in that case although then the nightmare is to do the organisation of medias depending of their view stats....