Power saving features with Dell H310

[BastianF]

Hi there,

i have a Dell H310 flashed with IT Mode firmware.
It seems i am not able to use any power saving features with the disks attached to it.
Is there any workaround?

Thanks!

 

[Dice]

What sort of power saving features are you looking for?

It is usually recommended to not use other power saving features than shutting off the machine on a regular basis other than if it would not be accessed let's say - once every week or so.

 

[BastianF]

What sort of power saving features are you looking for?

It is usually recommended to not use other power saving features than shutting off the machine on a regular basis other than if it would not be accessed let's say - once every week or so.

I want to use the built in feature from freenas; level 128

 

[joeschmuck]

So you want to park the heads because that is about all that will happen. The power savings is very minimal for this. Also, how do you know that this isn't working? Are you getting some error message?

 

[BastianF]

Code:

[root@nas] ~# ataidle /dev/da0
Model:
Serial:
Firmware Rev:
ATA revision:		   unknown/pre ATA-2
LBA 48:				 no
Geometry:			   0 cyls, 0 heads, 0 spt
Capacity:			   0MB
SMART Supported:		no
Write Cache Supported:  no
APM Supported:		  no
AAM Supported:		  no

Code:

[root@nas] ~# camcontrol identify da0
camcontrol: ATA ATAPI_IDENTIFY via pass_16 failed

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Are you sure that /dev/da0 denotes a HDD in your system? I'm seeing exactly the same output of ataidle /dev/da0 and camcontrol identify da0 on my system, but da0 denotes one of my mirrored USB boot devices.

 

[BastianF]

Yes, i am.

Code:

[root@nas] ~# smartctl -a /dev/da0
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:			   WD
Product:			  WD2001FYYG
Revision:			 D1R2
Compliance:		   SPC-4
User Capacity:		2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Rotation Rate:		7200 rpm
Form Factor:		  3.5 inches
Logical Unit id:	  0x50014ee50002c250
Serial number:		WCC160025823
Device type:		  disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-3)
Local Time is:		Sun Oct  2 08:00:54 2016 CEST
SMART support is:	 Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:	 Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Disabled or Not Supported

 

[MrToddsFriends]

While both commands give much more detailed output when run on a WD Red connected to the Avoton on-chip SATA controller on my system, both commands report APM and AAM as not supported (o.k., other HDD model and other SATA controller/HBA).

I also expect that the power savings by setting APM to 128 would be minimal, just like @joeschmuck already said.

Code:

~# ataidle /dev/ada0
Model:  WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0
Serial:  WD-WMC4N0E6K1VF
Firmware Rev:  82.00A82
ATA revision:  ATA-9
LBA 48:  yes
Geometry:  16383 cyls, 16 heads, 63 spt
Capacity:  2794GB
SMART Supported:  yes
SMART Enabled:  yes
Write Cache Supported:  yes
Write Cache Enabled:  yes
APM Supported:  no
AAM Supported:  no

Code:

~# camcontrol identify ada0
pass0: <WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 82.00A82> ACS-2 ATA SATA 3.x device
pass0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)

protocol  ATA/ATAPI-9 SATA 3.x
device model  WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0
firmware revision  82.00A82
serial number  WD-WMC4N0E6K1VF
WWN  50014ee65a574394
cylinders  16383
heads  16
sectors/track  63
sector size  logical 512, physical 4096, offset 0
LBA supported  268435455 sectors
LBA48 supported  5860533168 sectors
PIO supported  PIO4
DMA supported  WDMA2 UDMA6
media RPM  5400

Feature  Support  Enabled  Value  Vendor
read ahead  yes  yes
write cache  yes  yes
flush cache  yes  yes
overlap  no
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)  no  no
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)  yes  32 tags
NCQ Queue Management  no
NCQ Streaming  no
Receive & Send FPDMA Queued  no
SMART  yes  yes
microcode download  yes  yes
security  yes  no
power management  yes  yes
advanced power management  no  no
automatic acoustic management  no  no
media status notification  no  no
power-up in Standby  yes  no
write-read-verify  no  no
unload  yes  yes
general purpose logging  yes  yes
free-fall  no  no
Data Set Management (DSM/TRIM) no
Host Protected Area (HPA)  yes  no  5860533168/5860533168
HPA - Security  no

 

[joeschmuck]

Please post the output of smartctl -x /dev/da0 or camcontrol identify da0, either one will work. I suspect that you will have no APM or AAM support. When I checked my drives, which I know do support these features, I was a bit surprised to find out that they were not available. In my case I suspect it's because I'm running on a ESXi machine while I expected the pass-through to work perfectly, yet apparently it doesn't and I think ESXi itself is to blame.

With that said, it's more than likely the PERC is causing the issue for you. I would suspect that any drives plugged directly into the motherboard would allow the APM and AAM to be available.

 

[BastianF]

Is there no way no to get APM working with the H310?
I can not believe i am the first one to want to use this feature with the card...

Code:

[root@nas] ~# camcontrol identify da0
camcontrol: ATA ATAPI_IDENTIFY via pass_16 failed

Code:

[root@nas] ~# smartctl -x /dev/da0
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:			   WD
Product:			  WD2001FYYG
Revision:			 D1R2
Compliance:		   SPC-4
User Capacity:		2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Rotation Rate:		7200 rpm
Form Factor:		  3.5 inches
Logical Unit id:	  0x50014ee50002c250
Serial number:		WCC160025823
Device type:		  disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-3)
Local Time is:		Sun Oct  2 16:09:28 2016 CEST
SMART support is:	 Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:	 Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Disabled or Not Supported
Read Cache is:		Enabled
Writeback Cache is:   Disabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Current Drive Temperature:	 33 C
Drive Trip Temperature:		64 C

Manufactured in week 01 of year 2012
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  1048576
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  42
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  1114112
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  11150
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Error counter log:
		   Errors Corrected by		   Total   Correction	 Gigabytes	Total
			   ECC		  rereads/	errors   algorithm	  processed	uncorrected
		   fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:   40622883		0		 2  40622883		  0	  72343.528		   0
write:  108371973		2		61  108371975		  2	  12564.756		   0

Non-medium error count:	  511

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test			  Status				 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
	 Description							  number   (hours)
# 1  Background short  Completed				  48   16941				 - [-   -	-]
# 2  Background short  Completed				  48   16917				 - [-   -	-]
# 3  Background short  Completed				  48   16893				 - [-   -	-]
# 4  Background short  Completed				  48   16869				 - [-   -	-]
# 5  Background short  Completed				  48   16845				 - [-   -	-]
# 6  Background short  Completed				  48   16821				 - [-   -	-]
# 7  Background long   Completed				  48   16803				 - [-   -	-]
# 8  Background short  Completed				  48   16797				 - [-   -	-]
# 9  Background short  Completed				  48   16773				 - [-   -	-]
#10  Background short  Completed				  48   16749				 - [-   -	-]
#11  Background short  Completed				  48   16725				 - [-   -	-]
#12  Background short  Completed				  48   16701				 - [-   -	-]
#13  Background short  Completed				  48   16677				 - [-   -	-]
#14  Background short  Completed				  48   16654				 - [-   -	-]
#15  Background long   Completed				  48   16638				 - [-   -	-]
#16  Background short  Completed				  48   16632				 - [-   -	-]
#17  Background short  Completed				  48   16608				 - [-   -	-]
#18  Background short  Completed				  48   16584				 - [-   -	-]
#19  Background short  Completed				  48   16560				 - [-   -	-]
#20  Background short  Completed				  48   16536				 - [-   -	-]

Long (extended) Self Test duration: 15620 seconds [260.3 minutes]

Background scan results log
  Status: waiting until BMS interval timer expires
	Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 17169:15 [1030155 minutes]
	Number of background scans performed: 65,  scan progress: 0.00%
	Number of background medium scans performed: 65

Protocol Specific port log page for SAS SSP
relative target port id = 1
  generation code = 0
  number of phys = 1
  phy identifier = 0
	attached device type: SAS or SATA device
	attached reason: power on
	reason: unknown
	negotiated logical link rate: phy enabled; 6 Gbps
	attached initiator port: ssp=1 stp=1 smp=1
	attached target port: ssp=0 stp=0 smp=0
	SAS address = 0x50014ee50002c252
	attached SAS address = 0x5000000080000000
	attached phy identifier = 0
	Invalid DWORD count = 0
	Running disparity error count = 0
	Loss of DWORD synchronization = 2
	Phy reset problem = 0
	Phy event descriptors:
	 Transmitted SSP frame error count: 0
	 Received SSP frame error count: 0
relative target port id = 2
  generation code = 0
  number of phys = 1
  phy identifier = 1
	attached device type: no device attached
	attached reason: unknown
	reason: unknown
	negotiated logical link rate: phy enabled; unknown
	attached initiator port: ssp=0 stp=0 smp=0
	attached target port: ssp=0 stp=0 smp=0
	SAS address = 0x50014ee50002c253
	attached SAS address = 0x0
	attached phy identifier = 0
	Invalid DWORD count = 0
	Running disparity error count = 0
	Loss of DWORD synchronization = 0
	Phy reset problem = 0
	Phy event descriptors:
	 Transmitted SSP frame error count: 0
	 Received SSP frame error count: 0

 

[joeschmuck]

So your drives doesn't specify if they even could support APM or AAM. I have no experience with SAS drives so I'm not even sure if your drives support it in the first place and Google was not my friend in trying to figure this out. Someone else will need to chime in.

I can not believe i am the first one to want to use this feature with the card...

I can, only because the majority of our users won't use power management on the hard drives in a NAS. The drives you purchased were intended for enterprise data storage which means continuous use, not sleeping or even parking the heads because that would induce delays in data transfers. Minor delays but in the grand scheme of things like in a data center, it all adds up.

On a side note, your drive auto-parks the heads after a certain period of inactivity but I'm not sure what that is. To date it has parked the heads 11150 times and appears to have an estimated maximum life of 1114112 times. Doing some math and assuming the usage pattern will be similar to what has occurred over the past 2 years, you can expect the drive to not exceed the head parking limit for another 8 years.

Also you could try to use ataidle -S parameter to see if that works to change it but it will only be effective until you turn power off on the drive, then it will be gone and you would need to issue the command again.

 

[BastianF]

Code:

[root@nas] ~# ataidle -s da0
ataidle: error opening da0

 

[Stux]

Code:

[root@nas] ~# ataidle -s da0
ataidle: error opening da0

/dev/da0

?

 

[joeschmuck]

/dev/da0

?

Agreed, should be

Code:

ataidle -S 300 /dev/da0

@BastianF I hope you are looking up how to use the command and what it does. Here is the link.