Disks do not sleep

[neubert]

Dear community,

I want to minimize the power consumption of my FreeNAS box. The box runs 24x7 but is not in use 2/3 of the day. I set the HDD standby to 10 minutes which works quite well for me.

I never managed to configure the disks to go to sleep mode (lowest power mode). _Forcing_ them to sleep mode with ataidle -o /dev/adaX sometimes in the middle of the night when the disks are already in standby mode leads to an error

Jan 6 22:54:33 nas kernel: ahcich0: Timeout on slot 31 port 0
Jan 6 22:54:33 nas kernel: ahcich0: is 00000000 cs 8000000f ss 8000000f rs 8000000f tfd d0 serr 00000000 cmd 0000ff17
Jan 6 22:54:33 nas kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 08 f8 36 d1 40 bd 00 00 00 00 00
Jan 6 22:54:33 nas kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): CAM status: Command timeout
Jan 6 22:54:33 nas kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Retrying command

followed by an immediate wakeup. I assume some misunderstanding on my side. Any comments?

Thanks and kind regards,
Boris

 

[dlavigne]

Did you ever figure this out?

 

[Yatti420]

Well if you run 9.2.1.x i don't think the drives can sleep since syslog/samba data are on the pool etc..

 

[neubert]

Hi,

I am the OP. I never solved this but I later did not see the need for it anymore anyway: my disks are either in ACTIVE/IDLE or in STANDBY mode. In the latter mode the disks actually are spun down. The difference between the two modes is a total drop in power consumption of about 20 W for the three disks.

You can check with

Code:

camcontrol cmd adaX -a "E5 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" -r -

The reply consists of several bytes. The 10th byte is either 00 for disk spun down or FF for disk spinning. Other values are also permitted by the ATA specs but never get reported by my disks.

As Yatti420 mentioned, you should avoid using the pool for system data (cf. settings). Otherwise the disks are kept busy all the time writing the logs and samba data. I use a separate 2,5" WD Red disk with low power consumption for that purpose (please see my recent post on this).

Best regards
Boris