Frigate and Unraid tiered storage

[gu3stZA]

I gather Frigate on Unraid is quite a popular combination.

How are you all setting up your tiered storage (more recent recordings on SSD cache drive and older recordings on the HDD array)?

I have a cache drive and array set up, but I'm struggling to get Unraid to keep the cache full but move all the oldest files off cache to the array - effectively keeping only the newest recordings on cache.

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

Based on the available sources, there's a community-documented approach for setting up tiered storage with Frigate on systems with fast and slow storage.(1)

The recommended setup uses mergerfs to combine your SSD cache and HDD array into a single mount point that Frigate sees as one storage location.(1) This approach keeps Frigate unaware of the underlying storage complexity while automatically writing new recordings to your fast drive.(1)

Key Setup Steps:

1. Install mergerfs on your Unraid host(1)

2. Configure mergerfs to combine both storage locations with these important parameters in /etc/fstab:(1)

   • category.create=ff - writes new files to the drive with the most free space (prioritizing your SSD)(1)
   • minfreespace=20G - prevents writing to SSD when less than 20GB remains(1)
   • moveonenospc=true - handles space exhaustion gracefully(1)

3. Create a migration script that runs nightly to move recordings older than a specified number of days from your SSD to the HDD array(1)

4. Mount the unified path to your Frigate container at /media/frigate, preserving your existing Docker configuration(1)

The community has shared working scripts that either move files after a set number of days or maintain a target capacity threshold on the fast drive.(1) One approach moves entire days of recordings at once to avoid splitting dates between storage tiers.(1)

This setup is transparent to Frigate - it continues writing to /media/frigate while the host system handles the tiered storage underneath.(1)

Important Note: Frigate itself doesn't natively support multiple storage locations.(2) The mergerfs approach is the community-recommended workaround that works well with Unraid's cache/array architecture.(1)

📚 Sources:

1. Tiered Storage Setup for Frigate Using NVMe and Magnetic Disk
2. Ability to specify multiple storage locations

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[NickM-27]

In what way are you struggling to do that? It's effectively the default behavior as long as the share has array as secondary storage.

[gu3stZA]

Is the default behaviour not to clear the cache every night?

I have now found Mover Tuning plugin - which purportedly has this functionality of keeping your cache at a certain % usage and moves the oldest files first, but not sure I've got the settings dialed in because the cache still has some random looking folders.

I'll clear my cache and start from scratch with Mover Tuning plugin and see how it goes.

[NickM-27]

By default it clears down to a certain point. I wouldn't really see a point to clear down to 0% every day, then you lose the benefit faster of having cache.

[gu3stZA]

It seems like my issue was empty folders being left on the cache drive for some reason. I had been looking at the folders to see what was being moved and what wasn't, so the old folder made it look like old files were still on cache. However, it was just empty folders. Deleted the empty folders now so will keep track from here on out again :)