It seems that the majority of people use ACD for rclone and Plex and I’m just curious if anyone out there is actively using rclone + Google Drive?
ACD seems to be very unstable from a performance perspective. Sometimes I can max my 250Mbit connection, other times I can’t. This doesn’t just happen on my box, but it happens on other systems I use. For example, last night I copied a 10GB file and it took 8 !(&$@& hours on a 250Mbit connection.
I’m curious if Google Drive is more stable with Plex. I can’t say that my Plex with ACD is bad, but sometimes I can get buffering and I know it’s because there’s delays pulling the data off ACD. I’m guessing this is also one of the reasons Plex sent an email to all Plex Cloud beta testers that they were dropping ACD due to (what they say) inconsistent performance.
The main problem with google drive is that once you have big library and Plex preforms full scan eg access all folders you will get 24h ban.
The reason they gave for dropping is an excuse something else is going on. Probably 99% of Plex users have illegal content in their libraries with automated uploads etc…
The performance of ACD for streaming purposes is good, I tested 17 concurrent streams without a hickup ( the server was getting high on CPU so that would be bottle neck before acd ) and Plex Cloud would have even better performance as they are hosting in on Amazon infrastructure.
Interesting about the 24h ban, that’s quite unfortunate. I do have a big library (30TB, 30000+ items) so I imagine I’d get banned quite often as I have Plex to scan on directory changes.
I created a google drive remote this morning and uploaded 1 movie, the movie streamed fine, no hiccups at all, so I think it would have been a good choice. It’s really too bad about the 24h ban on Google.
As I said in the OP, ACD Isn’t bad, I just sometimes get stuttering/buffering and my server isn’t working at all. I’m using a dedicated box (Xeon 4 core, 8Thread, 32GB of RAM) so it’s not an issue with the box. May be some peering issues with where it’s hosting, but transfers almost always quite fast (except that example I gave).
Anyway, thanks for providing your input, guess I’ll hold off moving my stuff for now.
I will stick with ACD for now ( still making backup copy to gdrive ).
Atm Iam considering taking another amazon drive and making some load balancing between them eg switch one per 12h connection on plex/stream. ( due the fact i got blocked 4 times in last month )
I have high hopes for ACD as their native app was recently updated with folder sync and that will mean a lot more traffic and hammering from all users eg the more power users wont be so noticeable.
Without sync the average user probably did not even had that much data and was only transferring here and there.
My only fear is that they will go out of their way to prevent file seeks, not that hard to do since they have stream limitation of 200MB i think eg they could make it much worse for all bigger files.So far I dont think any cloud provider did that but then again ACD is beyond popular and they did fuck up with 3 months free trial lol thats why to much.
My main lib is on ACD and I copied 60% so far to Gdrive but when testing watching or copying my ACD drive still outperforms google( not by much … around 10% in file copy at least as for stream both works flawlessly ) and both my home PC and server I host at hetzner.
p.s. I definitely support offline cashing as Amazon may go in google direction or even worst hubic ( where you are limited with 10Mbit )
For GDrive, would the risk of getting 24hr band reduced if all none-media files (.jpg, .nfo, .srt) are not stored in GDrive and you’re only storing media files (.mp4/.mkv) in GDrive? I was thinking of keeping non-media files on my server as they don’t really take up much space. This will substantially reduce the number of files stored in the cloud by 80-90%.
For me ACD still seems the most viable option. Although performance is sporadic, it is still very quite fast. I haven’t tested out GDrive for Plex yet. It looks like the only way to get unlimited GDrive is to sign up for G Suite for $10/month?
Does anyone know where GDrive servers are actually located? I’ve been planning to move to a server with good peering to ACD (servers are located in Northern Virginia). It’d be good to know where GDrive servers are located in case GDrive becomes a more viable option.
If anyone is interested, WhatBox.ca is provides a very good seedbox plan that works with ACD + rclone/acd_cli + plex. They’re also located in Northern Virginia and has a 1ms ping to ACD servers.
Interesting. I had my Plex server on Hetzner up until a month ago. Peering I found was bad to ACD North America. I also found the streaming to be a bit wonky. I did have an Intel NIC on mine. It was about 42 euro a month for an Xeon E3 with 32gb of ram and 2TB of space. Even though Hetzner advertises 1Gbps connection I wasn’t getting anywhere near that.
I switched recently to SoYouStart (OVH) in a Canadian data centre and speeds are much faster. I’m in Canada and so are my family members using Plex so I think I may stick with it for a while anyway.
I had the same issue with Hetzner too. Their price is a steal but peering to the West Coast USA not unbearably slow so I had to switch to a North American server.
Iam from Europe and using Amazon Drive DE ( German one ) and it works great, copying from ACD to GDRIVE on it ( i stopped doing it on hetner and do it on my download server now ) with 100+ transfers gave me average speeds of 90MB.
I just tested Google Drive with rclone crypt and performance is great. Streaming seems more stable than ACD. I was able to play an 80mbps video without buffering/freezing. I’m just hesitant to switch to Google Drive because of the 24hr ban.
@MartinBowling Just curious did you get the 24hr ban with a full library scan (as such when moving to new Plex server) or with just library scans when new files are added?
@MartinBowling Full library scan can be very intensive since files need to be analyzed for codec and subtitles. I already have my library scanned with ACD, hopefully this will make switching to Google Drive easier and I won’t get banned. If it’s a new library scan, I don’t think having a local library cache makes a difference since all the files needs to be analyzed. I ran some test with Google Drive with rclone crypt and performance is outstanding (at least with 1 concurrent stream, can watch 80mbps video, same performance as videos stored locally on server). Will probably switch over to Google Drive from ACD.
FYI, if you have work/school email that’s hosted by google, chances are that you have unlimited Google Drive for free! I still have my email active from college and it comes free unlimited Google Drive.
