ataidle vs smartctl for spindown

[wintermute000]

After playing around with Freenas, I've come to the conclusion that I would like to spindown in evening only i.e. when people are also asleep. So I thought I'd just put a script in cron to kick the drives into spindown say midnight or something like that. I don't think spinning down once a day is going to reduce the life too much (as opposed to setting a timer, and having it do it a many times a day).

However I realise I can do it via ataidle or smartctl. Is there any difference or recommendation?

ataidle -o /dev/adaX at midnight,
ataidle -i /dev/adaX at 8AM
vs
smartctl --set=standby,now /dev/adaX at midnight,
smartctl --set=standby,off /dev/adaX at 8AM

All my drives are via onboard SATA. Note my system dataset is on separate ssd.

Also another n00b question, these commands will force the drive to sleep but will NOT set a standby timer correct? i.e. any activity will wake it and leave it woken even if I don't run a wakeup script.

Finally, another possibly stupid question - the act itself of setting standby commands / APM levels does not damage drives right? like for example writing to some kind of flash memory that has limited cycles lol

Freenas 9.2.1.7
Asrock C2550D4I, 6xHGST 4Gb NAS drives in RAIDZ2, 2xSandisk SSDs (1 scratch/jail, 1 iSCSI zvol), 16Gb ECC RAM

 

[Ericloewe]

I don't know if it'll work (haven't tried it, not planning to), but here are a few things to keep in mind:

Around that time you'll probably have SMART Long Tests or Scrubs coming up (along with Short Tests, but those can easily be scheduled for 30 minutes before the idle time), so keep them in mind.

As for damage, spinning up and down once a day is unlikely to significantly degrade the drives' motors (the heads are rated for a few hundred thousand load/unload cycles, so they're not the issue). Spinning down only to spin it up 10 minutes later (as above) is a bit of a waste, though. Some wear and tear is inevitable, and if this is less than keeping the drive running is subject to ferocious debate. Once a day should be alright in either case, though.

 

[wintermute000]

Good point, will probably have to realign my smart/scrub and then cron to exclude that evening or something similar.
I would just plow ahead ordinarily but wary of tinkering with hardware on a relatively expensive new system that's working perfectly, if anyone has any insights into ataidle vs smartctl that would be great.