Waking up a NAS HDD with Jellyfin



Last modified on May 29, 2026

I have at home a NAS that I use as backup for important documents and as primary storage for my medias. With the latter, I like to use Jellyfin, which provides a great interface!

I recently changed my old Synology model for the recent UGREEN DXP4800 Plus, on which I can now install Docker and run Jellyfin. That’s a great improvement! Prior to that, Jellyfin was running on an Intel NUC , which required a bit more maintenance (especially since it was running Windows).

I am happy with this move, but one thing has been bothering me: the hard drive of the NAS are really slow to wake up. From the moment you start a media in Jellyfin, it takes about 15-20 seconds to start playing, which I find unpleasant. It was much faster with my previous setup, and I’m unsure why.

All Docker containers and their data are stored on a SSD , while the bulk storage is on HDD s. So when I browse the media library, the metadata is loaded from the SSD , but when I start a media, it has to be read on the HDD s. And those are often asleep (to preserve them and save energy).

I have searched how to wake up the HDD s when opening Jellyfin to prevent that delay, but haven’t found a simple solution. I have nonetheless found a workaround that is fast to implement and works well: I created a PHP script that stats a directory on the HDD s (waking them up), and configured the webhook plugin of Jellyfin to call this script on some events (like session start).

My Docker compose file for Jellyfin initially looked like this:

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services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin:10.11.9
    container_name: jellyfin
    tty: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri
    volumes:
      - /volume1/docker/jellyfin/config:/config:rw
      - /volume1/docker/jellyfin/cache:/cache:rw
      - /volume1/docker/jellyfin/logs:/logs:rw
      - /volume2/Medias:/data:ro
    ports:
     - "8096:8096"

We’ll add a second service for the web server running the PHP script, and link them on a private network:

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services:
  jellyfin:
    # Previous configuration omitted for brevity. We only add this 'networks' section to the 'jellyfin' service.
    networks:
      - public
      - private

  # We create a new service to run an HTTP server with PHP support.
  webhook:
    image: erseco/alpine-php-webserver:3.23.4
    user: 65534:65534 # Run as 'nobody' user
    container_name: webhook-server
    tty: true
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - /volume1/docker/webhook-server:/var/www/html:ro
      - /volume2/Medias:/var/www/trigger:ro
    networks:
     - private

# We define the two networks used by the services.
networks:
  private:
    internal: true
  public:

The network ‘public’ is required to allow Jellyfin to be accessed from the local network, while the ‘private’ network is only used between the two containers. This makes the webhook server inaccessible from the local network, which is a good security measure (I have no reason to expose it). The script itself is stored on the SSD (‘volume1’), which is mounted where the container expects it (’/var/www/html’). The other volume is giving read access to the media storage on the HDD s (that’s the directory we’ll stat).

The PHP script (saved on ‘/volume1/docker/webhook-server/index.php’) is quite simple:

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<?php
declare(strict_types=1);
$directory = '/var/www/trigger';

http_response_code(200);

if (!is_dir($directory)) {
	http_response_code(500);
	error_log("Directory '$directory' does not exist!");
	exit;
}
clearstatcache(true, $directory);
stat($directory);

It simply stats the directory on the HDD s, and clears the stat cache to make sure it hits the filesystem. We don’t need more (although you could parse the notification payload and implement more complex logic).

Finally, on Jellyfin, I installed the webhook plugin (which is official): in Administration → Dashboard → Plugins, select the Available ones, select Webhook and click Install. You need to restart the server after that (on the home Dashboard page, click the Restart button). Go back to the Plugins page, select the Installed ones, select Webhook again and click on Settings. In the plugin configuration, I added a new webhook with the following settings:

Then click on Save at the bottom of the page. That’s it! Now, when you open a Jellyfin session (e.g. by opening the web interface or any application), the webhook will be triggered, the PHP script triggered by that HTTP request will stat the directory on the HDD s, and by the time you choose a media to play, the drives should be running.