Extra SSD(s) - is it worth it

[JuJuJurassic 49]

I'm decommissioning some old servers and will have quite a few 500GB SSDs. I can add them to the Emby server, but what use would they be?

The motherboard has 3 spare sata ports, so I could add 3.

It's running ubuntu 20.4.x

The server has a m.2 as its main disk and uses 2 SMB shares to access its media. 

I considered using the SSDs as cache, but the M.2 isn't full. I suppose it would offload a bit.

Is it worth it?

Any suggestions

 

[Neminem 1519]

I would use 1 for transcoding.

and use 2 in raid1 as metadata if that's important.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

I find that SSDs do little to improve streaming. Although as a boot device the do speed things up a LOT. 

Video streaming is not either a disk or CPU hog. It is very simple and non-invasive process. It is mostly only transcoding that causes problems and that can be pretty easily avoided. I have toyed with the idea of using SSDs in my drive array but I have rejected that idea as the improvement would be tiny. 

Most of the time when I see any Emby slowness at all it is for things like image loading during library access and that is not really slow at all. I just have to wait a very few seconds for all the images to catch up. 

I, currently, use no SSDs anywhere in my Emby setup and I rarely even notice any slowness at all. It, I think, is more a matter of perception than it is actual performance.

Of course it probably helps that all my media direct plays and I do not have any need for high resolutions or high bit-rates. 
See, there is an advantage to having old eyes. 

I do not see any real advantage to SSDs but my use case is not exactly "usual." 

[Clackdor 109]

44 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

Most of the time when I see any Emby slowness at all it is for things like image loading during library access and that is not really slow at all. I just have to wait a very few seconds for all the images to catch up.

If I remember correctly you also use Stablebit Drivepool right? I have a couple of SSD's in my pool and have file placement rules set to keep images and nfo files on the SSD's since I'm storing them alongside media. It makes a drastic difference in image loading performance and browsing libraries in general. All of the images load instantly. I also have a separate pool of 2 SSD's for the transcoding location. 

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

3 hours ago, Clackdor said:

If I remember correctly you also use Stablebit Drivepool right? I have a couple of SSD's in my pool and have file placement rules set to keep images and nfo files on the SSD's since I'm storing them alongside media. It makes a drastic difference in image loading performance and browsing libraries in general. All of the images load instantly. I also have a separate pool of 2 SSD's for the transcoding location. 

But that is a lot of money spent for what i find is marginal improvement. 
The slowness i mentioned is never longer than 20-30 seconds or so at the worst and that is for my 4500+ movie library when I first load the movie library and immanently go to say the Ts, All the media is available right away but the images can take 20-30 seconds to all load. I do not think saving a maximum of 30 seconds every so often matters much, at least for me. If i paid hundreds of dollars to save a few seconds from time to time I would feel my money was wasted. 

[Q-Droid 989]

+1 for transcoding temp path. If you watch live TV then the DVR playback/rewind buffer can have dedicated storage (transcoding temp) and not run the risk of filling the boot/root drive. If you do conversions you can have yet another separate dedicated path for that as well. Free SSDs for non-critical stuff you can toss when they die. Just keep them trimmed.

[Clackdor 109]

50 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

But that is a lot of money spent for what i find is marginal improvement

I get where you're coming from. Really though even a couple of cheap/small sata SSD's would be faster than hard drives, so no need to spend a lot. I do have several other friends/family that use the server, including my impatient 4 and 5 year old kids, so to me it's definitely worth it. Not to mention I'm storing other data that benefits from the speed on those SSD's.

[Clackdor 109]

35 minutes ago, Q-Droid said:

+1 for transcoding temp path. If you watch live TV then the DVR playback/rewind buffer can have dedicated storage (transcoding temp) and not run the risk of filling the boot/root drive. If you do conversions you can have yet another separate dedicated path for that as well. Free SSDs for non-critical stuff you can toss when they die. Just keep them trimmed.

Agreed. I have transcoding set to dedicated SSD's to minimize writes to my boot drive and other drives with valuable data on them.

[JuJuJurassic 49]

As the SSDs were free, only 500gb, I changed the Cache path to one SSD, and the Transcoding temporary path to aother. There are usually no more than 3 users on at any time, a max of 5. Only a very few 4k, most are 1080p

It was that or just throw the SSDs, and that would be wrong.

I have 32 GB Ram in the server, I was thinking of adding more, thoughts?

What I'd really like is a plug-in that records the CPU / Memory / disk usage over time, by the emby process, but unfortunately there isn't one. It's running on Ubutu 20.

Thanks for your help  

[Neminem 1519]

19 hours ago, JuJuJurassic said:

What I'd really like is a plug-in that records the CPU / Memory / disk usage over time, by the emby process, but unfortunately there isn't one. It's running on Ubutu 20.

You could try something like 

1) Netdata - Open Source | Netdata
2) Prometheus and Grafana - Get started with Grafana and Prometheus | Grafana documentation
3) CheckMK - https://checkmk.com/product/latest-version
4) Zabbix - Zabbix :: The Enterprise-Class Open Source Network Monitoring Solution
There are so many ways to do this

I use Prometheus and Grafana all installed in docker on my unRaid server.

[rbjtech 5284]

You need to be a little careful here - is the m.2 nvme ?  or m.2 sata ? nvme is significantly faster than any SATA based SSD.    So while I agree any parallel I/O processsing you can do (on multiple controllers) is a good thing, moving your main 'cache' from m.2/nvme to SATA SSD is imo a bad decision and performance will degrade, not improve.

[JuJuJurassic 49]

6 hours ago, Neminem said:

You could try something like 

1) Netdata - Open Source | Netdata
2) Prometheus and Grafana - Get started with Grafana and Prometheus | Grafana documentation
3) CheckMK - https://checkmk.com/product/latest-version
4) Zabbix - Zabbix :: The Enterprise-Class Open Source Network Monitoring Solution
There are so many ways to do this

I use Prometheus and Grafana all installed in docker on my unRaid server.

Thanks Neminem. I'll have a look

 

[JuJuJurassic 49]

Incidentally, I also increased the memory from 32 GB to 64 GB. I have 1 PCIE slot left, so I might put a PCIE to M.2 card in there with a m.2 nvme ssd. Would 1 TB be big enough for the transcoding?

It has a "Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC Low Profile 4G GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GDDR5" - graphics card for transcoding

Thanks

[sh0rty 717]

On 1/19/2025 at 11:56 AM, Neminem said:

You could try something like 

1) Netdata - Open Source | Netdata
2) Prometheus and Grafana - Get started with Grafana and Prometheus | Grafana documentation
3) CheckMK - https://checkmk.com/product/latest-version
4) Zabbix - Zabbix :: The Enterprise-Class Open Source Network Monitoring Solution
There are so many ways to do this

I use Prometheus and Grafana all installed in docker on my unRaid server.

As a dead simple and lightweight solution I would also throw in Beszel  henrygd/beszel: Lightweight server monitoring hub with historical data, docker stats, and alerts.

[JuJuJurassic 49]

On 19/01/2025 at 14:23, rbjtech said:

You need to be a little careful here - is the m.2 nvme ?  or m.2 sata ? nvme is significantly faster than any SATA based SSD.    So while I agree any parallel I/O processsing you can do (on multiple controllers) is a good thing, moving your main 'cache' from m.2/nvme to SATA SSD is imo a bad decision and performance will degrade, not improve.

Now that's a good point I missed / hadn't thought of.

The motherboard is a Z590-A PRO

The SSD is SATA based, the original  storage was, from the manual, a M2_1 slot (from CPU).... Supports up to PCIe 4.0x4" so you're right the SATA based SSD would probably be slower, so I moved the cache back, but I have a spare, again from the manual "....M2_32 slot. (from Z590 chipset)..Support up to PCIe 3.0x4...Support up to SATA 6Gb/s" So I could get an M.2 SSD and plug it into the slot, hopefully giving better performance than the SATA SSD, probably a "WD_BLACK SN770 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD" and move my cache back there. I like to keep the OS and data separate as much as possible. What do you think? And thanks for pointing it out, good call.

Edited January 20, 2025 by JuJuJurassic

[Q-Droid 989]

If you don't have a performance bottleneck now then you're not solving anything by throwing hardware at it. In real usage you won't notice the sub-millisecond differences between SATA SSD and PCI NVME. Not at the low IOPS and throughput of a media server. 

[JuJuJurassic 49]

3 hours ago, shorty1483 said:

As a dead simple and lightweight solution I would also throw in Beszel  henrygd/beszel: Lightweight server monitoring hub with historical data, docker stats, and alerts.

Just installed it, it's exactly what I'm after, thank you

[RanmaCanada 495]

If you have more of the m.2 sata drives available and want more space you could always use this device to increase your space. I have one personally but I have not gotten around to using it as I ended up using my drives in single enclosures to use as thumb drives.