First Playback often slow. SMB or NFS? (Synology)

[Iacov]

hey

my setup is:
jf in docker on a ubuntu vm on proxmox. I have my media on my synology nas. I have mounted the respective shares as smb/cifs directly to the ubuntu vm.

I'm not sure if it happens on my android devices too, but I have experienced on the android TV app (chromecast), that the first playback is sometimes slow to start.

I don't know if it's a quirk of the android TV app or a quirk of smb shares or the process of my nas having to wake up from. idle(though I don't have explicit/aggressive power saving settings in effect)

I know that it would be better to run jellyfin natively on the synology, but the cpu is aging and I wanted to offload the load to a dedicated unit. 

but is mounting via smb a valid option or does it have drawbacks I was/am not aware of? (I didn't mount via nfs, because I'm not "fluent" with fstab and didn't want to dabble with nfsv4 mounting)

maybe I'm just paranoid... but I'm trying to set up jellyfin as "family-proof" as I can and want to make sure that not my own misconfiguration causes issues

[Efficient_Good_5784]

Do you have the HDDs in your Synology set to spin down when idle for x amount of time?

[Iacov]

Do you have the HDDs in your Synology set to spin down when idle for x amount of time?

yes, that's active
that's why it's on my list of suspects - though the time i had to wait for the stream to start (was aroung 15 sec) was way higher, than i would usually wait for a smb share to "wake up" when using windows (probably around 5 sec)

[Efficient_Good_5784]

This situation can be described with that famous saying, "you can't have your cake and eat it too".

If you want instantaneous playback on the first time, every time, you need to disable disk spindown and have them constantly spinning 24/7.

If you're worried about your HDDs' health, constantly spinning them up and down destroys them faster than just having them always spin constantly.

If you're worried about electricity costs, you'll have to do the math based on where you live and the kWh cost you need to pay.

As an example, if you pay $0.15 USD per kWh, and your Synology unit on idle uses 35 watts, that's 0.035 kWh (35 ÷ 1000) and will cost you $0.00525 USD (.035 × .15) per hour to keep idle. If you're to keep it idle for a day, you'll pay $0.126 per day. If you'll keep it idle for a year, you'll pay $45.99 per year. To follow this math, just replace the currency with your own and your own costs.

Also, if you really don't want the HDDs to be spinning 24/7, you can compromise and only have one or two drives spin while the rest spin down using an OS like Unraid. With how Unraid works, it allows you to have all of your video files on a certain disk(s) that you can keep spinning 24/7. Unraid will allow you to spin the other disks down. This way, you get fast access to the media in your Jellyfin library while also having all other non-related disks not spinning.