Green server

[doglover]

Hi all. I am curious what most people are doing about spinning down their hard drives and noise settings. I have set up this server in the basement which > 90% of the time is sitting there just spinning, doing nothing. I always keep my computers on all the time, guess I've bought into the notion that they last longer that way.

The default setting is always on and acoustic disabled. I have three SeaGate green drives, which are also supposed to be very quiet and low energy. I wonder if I should spin them down after a time and set the noise level to minimum. What are you experts doing?

Thanks,
IMF

 

[cyberjock]

I was gonna tell you to search the forum because I answered this in detail, but I can't even find my own post! So here it is again :)

I've found that leaving hard drives on 24x7 with adequate cooling to keep temps below 40C is the best way to prolong their life. Hard drives that are constantly spinning up and down either as part of a system startup and shutdown or for power savings just seem to fail so much more frequently. My windows server has 22 drives, all installed about 29 months ago, and all have been kept below 40C and on 24x7 pretty much their entire life. My first failure was about a week ago.

A few other senior guys made the same observation, but some have chosen to do the spindown anyway.

I leave my system on with spindown/sleep disabled. If I go on a vacation for a week then I might shut it down. Otherwise you can expect those drives to be spinning.

If you feel compelled to enable hard drive sleep I recommend you choose a very high value for sleeping. Choosing a low value only means the drives will be cycling even more.

 

[bollar]

I guess I'd say leave them powered up as well, but the one array I do have with power save enabled has no more failed drives than the others. Probably more important is how rapidly the disk manufacturer replaces a failed drive.

Code:

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   112   099   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       42019664
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   100   100   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   093   093   020    Old_age   Always       -       7218
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   046   046   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       27668453712077
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   077   077   000    Old_age   Always       -       20968
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       74
183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       4295295012
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   065   065   000    Old_age   Always       -       35
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   070   046   045    Old_age   Always       -       30 (Min/Max 26/48)
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   030   054   000    Old_age   Always       -       30 (0 18 0 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   028   022   000    Old_age   Always       -       42019664
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       233556026609110
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       3613931325
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       3256287237