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Weekly Advice / No Stupid Questions Post
We're restarting the Friday Advice / No Stupid Questions (NSQ) Post after a break.
This is part of a weekly series of Plex Advice threads for novices and pros alike to ask questions, give advice, troubleshoot, and share knowledge and resources! Please be polite and helpful to beginners just getting started out, and we want to be as welcoming as we can to newcomers to this community.
Common subjects can include:
- Simple Plex Media Server setup
- System requirements and advice buying components
- Advice choosing the operating system that's right for you
- Getting started with a new operating system (eg. Linux)
- Advanced setup and configuration
- Help with PMS add-ons:
- Docker
- VPN advice
- Setup / configuration of the *arr family of apps (Sonarr, Radarr, etc.)
Anyone who posts good starter guides, FAQs, and/or wikis may get their links added to the sidebar so the rest of the community can benefit!
Cheers!
Useful Resources
- Plex FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions about using Plex Media Server and client apps with many useful links
- Useful Plex Add-ons - Detailed info on many Plex add-ons with setup guides and other useful links
- Organizing and Naming Your Media Files
- Troubleshooting Server Connections
- Plex User Forums
I occasionally run into the issue where I try to play a file, but after some buffering, I get the message "please make sure the drive is mounted." The drive with the file is still connected to the server and is accessible through file explorer, so it's not that the drive is asleep or anything. I usually have to completely uninstall Plex and reinstall it in order to fix this, and it often coincides with the bug where the languages of my libraries are totally blank. I've actually started to use Jellyfin most of the time because Plex has become so unreliable. Any ideas as to what's going on?
in all of my years of using plex, I’ve never heard of this one…
how are you connected to this drive? is it internal, external, or is it a network/NAS solution? also, what are the specs on your machine? what OS is it running, etc. how are you running PMS? is it running in a docker container, or is it bare metal? is it possible the machine is going to sleep/suspending?
Yeah, it's been a real pain for a while. All my media drives are external WDs connected directly to the laptop running the server over USB 3.0. It's a fairly beefy Win10 machine with an i7-7700HQ and a GTX 1070M. I'm running it on bare metal and the computer is set up to never suspend\go to sleep. I also disabled the power-saving USB suspend settings, and the drives stay accessible over file explorer and Jellyfin, so it seems like a Plex issue.
I wonder if them being plugged into USB has anything to do with it like maybe they're getting assigned different ports or the laptop is shutting the ports off after X amount of time (to save power).
hmmm... well, n order to diagnose anything, I would need to see your plex media server logs from around the time one of your drives "disconnects" to even see what's going on.