Google Drive Native client vs. Rclone (for Plex)

Hello all, long time Rclone user, I just signed up for an unlimited google drive account (750gb daily upload limits as with any of their accounts) wondering what experience people have had with the native google client (for Plex and in general) it seems to allocate a maximum of 20% of local disk space as a cache - I never really used Rclone with google drive so was interested in community feedback - thanks

hi,

the rclone vfs cache can be configued and optimizd for many use-cases including streaming.
many rcloners do not use a cache and often myself included.

why not try it for yourself?

  1. create a rclone remote for gdrive.
  2. use rclone mount so plex can see the files.

I know that Rclone works, and it obviously has Plex specific hooks, just curious if people have actually used the google official drive desktop client recently (as it has certainly added in it's feature set in recent times)

rclone does not have specific hooks for plex or for any specific media server.

sure it does, in the cache file system:

There is a direct integration with Plex which allows cache to detect during reading if the file is in playback or not. This helps cache to adapt how it queries the cloud provider depending on what is needed for.

Scans will have a minimum amount of workers (1) while in a confirmed playback cache will deploy the configured number of workers.

This integration opens the doorway to additional performance improvements which will be explored in the near future.

welcome back, rclone has evolved over the last two years.

the buggy, never left beta cache remote has been depreciated as documented here

Good to know, which makes my question all the more relevant as the native google client has gotten much more robust in that timeframe especially when it comes to caching

There isn't a native client for Linux so I've never used it.

that is a good point, as i use linux more and more often on home sever and android.

do you crypt the media files?

Yep. I most definitely do.

You can read some of my experiences here: Support for Google Drive File Stream (GDFS) · Issue #3207 · rclone/rclone · GitHub

thank you, I'll actually update as well - so I actually now run both the regular official google drive client and rclone mount - I find rclone way smarter on arbitrary caching vs. google drive's client for plex - but with google's client I don't need to do a whole separate "shared with me"

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How does google's client present "shared with me" - are they always present? Or in a separate directory?

Separate at the top level “my drive” and “shared drives” at the top level

Also side note it has a hidden

.file-revision-by-id and .shortcut-target-by-id as well as a windows recycle bin as well

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Oh as an addendum this for google workspace enterprise standard - which still has the $20 actual unlimited (with the same 750 gb daily transfer quota)

I've had lots of requests to make the drive backend do this...

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