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I run UnRaid, a software raid program on my file server which serves up media to XBMC.
My server is always on, but my drives spin down to save power.
If I start XBMC without manually spinning up my hard drives on my server, then XBMC cannot access any of the media, it says it is no longer available, would I like to delete it from my collection?
If I go to the "files" area, it says the drives are not available.
Through windows I can access the drives just fine, they just take 5 seconds to spin up before I can access them.
How do I fix this?
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How have you configured the sources? The most reliable way in in the Add source/Browse dialog select "Add network location" and feed in the server and share names. This will add an entry to list of network locations in the form smb://server/share/. Select this location to add the source.
The smb://etc source is pretty robust and tolerant of temporary network errors.
JR
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Glimmerman911, I also have unRAID and do not have this problem. I'm using NFS shares (but SMB shares worked as well). Add the source per jhsrennie's instruction.
I would recommend using cache_dirs on unRAID as well as it can prevent unnecessary drive spin-up upon a request for directory listing.
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I've seen that on occasion, even with cache_dirs & smb. I just respond no, and then select it again. I did a bit of checking and with unraid it has been reported that nfs really isn't much faster than smb.
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I added NFS just to have experience setting it up and playing with it - I only saw a couple megabit/s difference, but now that it's set up and MySQL has nfs entries for all my sources I don't see any real value in switching back to smb presently.
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Jhsrennie, I did not add them as network sources, I have the shared drives mapped to the PC and just added them as if they are local. That must be causing the problem.
How do I correct it now? Do I simply delete the sources and re-add them as network locations, will it mess up my library in any way?
Sureguy, cache-dirs sounds really helpfull, how do I install it or configure it?
Thank you all for your help, greatly appreciated!
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Deleting and recreating the sources will mess up the library.
The simplest course is to export the library to multiple files. This will write .nfo files into the directories where your videos are. When you rescan XBMC will read these .nfo files instead of going to the Internet to get the info.
JR
