Getting Drives To Standby in 11.2?

[Baptiste]

Hey there,

Recently took the dive to 11.2 and I am really loving the interface. But I am having a hard time getting the drives to standby. Yes I am aware that putting drives on standby and waking them up causes more wear, that isn't my issue, and I am not worried about electricity costs. I just hate hearing my drives always spinning even when I'm not using them, drives me nuts.

I tried a couple things, such as changing the standby time to 5, and power management. No luck.
Then i tried adding the SMART option of ' -n standby ' and that didn't work. Tried disabling SMART all together, didn't work either.

And I did move the System Dataset to a USB, still no luck.

I have 0 idea what I could be missing.

Any ideas?

 

[Chris Moore]

I just hate hearing my drives always spinning even when I'm not using them, drives me nuts.

You shouldn't be able to hear the drives over the fans. If you can hear either, you have the system too close to your head. Move it somewhere else, or add some sound insulation.

You might also try reading through this thread:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/spinning-down-drives-drives-never-idle.55010/

or this one:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-let-drives-spin-down.26314/

or this:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/trying-to-spin-down-idle-harddrives.49673/

also this:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-spin-down.62709/

The process has not really changed much, but you missed an important step, the reporting database...
If you are going to put all that activity on the boot pool, you need something better than a USB memory stick.

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. Did you have this working sometime in the past or is this a new build?

You should always post your hardware description per the instructions here:

Updated Forum Rules 12/5/18
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/updated-forum-rules-12-5-18.45124/

 

[Baptiste]

You shouldn't be able to hear the drives over the fans. If you can hear either, you have the system too close to your head. Move it somewhere else, or add some sound insulation.

You might also try reading through this thread:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/spinning-down-drives-drives-never-idle.55010/

or this one:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-let-drives-spin-down.26314/

or this:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/trying-to-spin-down-idle-harddrives.49673/

also this:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-spin-down.62709/

The process has not really changed much, but you missed an important step, the reporting database...
If you are going to put all that activity on the boot pool, you need something better than a USB memory stick.

Hey Chris, thanks for the links. Most of those I saw when I was googling around but I'll double check and I'll look at the one I didn't see before.

It's definitely the drives, not the fans. I live in a fairly sound isolated loft so the slightest background noise is easily audible anywhere. When I'm trying to sleep it can be awful to have a constant humming in the background.

Is a USB stick not good enough for speed reasons?
Do I just check the reporting database check mark?

 

[Baptiste]

PS. Did you have this working sometime in the past or is this a new build?

You should always post your hardware description per the instructions here:

Updated Forum Rules 12/5/18
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/updated-forum-rules-12-5-18.45124/

Same build, but updated OS. I'm pretty sure I had it working before, but I had my NAS off for 3 months as I haven't needed it till lately.

NAS Specs:
Case: node 804
FreeNAS 11.2-Stable
A8-6600K
Gigabyte F2A88XM-D3H
8GB DDR3 (2 X 4GB)
5 X 1TB HDD (Raid z2)
2 X 8GB USB (Mirror - Boot)
1 x 500GB(Mac back up)
1 x 250GB (Windows back up)

 

[Chris Moore]

Is a USB stick not good enough for speed reasons?

Speed could be an issue but don't take that as a suggestion to move to USB 3.0 as they introduce even more problems with reliability. The problem is that all those things you are moving to the boot media (system dataset, syslog and reporting database) cause drive activity. All that drive activity is more than most USB memory sticks can handle and they tend to die without warning. I had two die on me in less than one year. I use mechanical hard drives (small capacity, 40GB drives) instead of USB drives now.

Do I just check the reporting database check mark?

That will help, but it still is not the whole story. You may also need to ensure that your system swap is moved off the data pool.
You may end up being a trail blazer if you get this working on the latest version of FreeNAS, but it has all been documented before. Just do some searching on the forum. I did it myself, a long time ago, but I have not tried it lately.
If you take some time to get accustomed to the white noise, it will not bother you any more. I have so many fans running in my home for air circulation that I barely notice the sound of all the computers. Quiet is bad for you.

 

[Baptiste]

Ha, "quiet is bad for you." I like that, kinda like the whole 'if you can't hear the kids, means something bad has happened' or however it goes.
That being said, I assure you the noise is very audible and distracting.
I'm not super tech savoy when it comes to these things but I tried a few things and I just want to show you my findings.

So using this command I found on the forum:

ataidle -s /dev/adaX

I'm able to force the drives to sleep, and it does work. And by using:

/usr/local/sbin/smartctl -n standby /dev/adaX

I was able to prove the drives were in fact now in standby.

I was also able to confirm it is the drives causing the noise and not the fans as once all 7 drives were spun down, you really had to stick your ear to the case to hear it. Unlike other times when I can hear the spinning from across the apartment.

I also found this nice line of code from someone else on the forum:
nanotube# cat standby_check #!/usr/local/bin/bash while [ 1 ] do ada0_out=`camcontrol cmd ada5 -a "E5 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" -r -` echo "ADA0: $ada0_out" sleep 10 done nanotube# ./standby_check

Basically just checks on a loop if your drive is spun down or not instead of constantly manually doing it.

One last thing, In Tasks / Init/Shutdown Scripts I added this line of code ataidle -S 5 /dev/ada0 to a 'Post Init' command.
However it never seemed to work, but if I went to Shell and manually entered it, my drives would spin down almost instantly.
There seems to be some weird disconnect somewhere I'm not getting...