HD-spin down possible for individual drives?

[Hans1]

hi,
i am looking for a NAS solution for a home network, to replace my windows7-pc that is doing the job now.
i want to store some personal data there and my movies, music, home-videos (those i play with kodi/raspi).
since i dont use the nas every day, i dont want to run all 8 drives permanently.
(i know about hd-lifetime-shortage due to spindowns - i want a low-energy solution)

and i have 2 questions / is this possible??
1) is it possible that hd's can spin down if they are not used, and only those drives will wake up that are needed (e.g. i watch a movie, only movie-drive will wake up, the rest stays asleep, of course the one holding the os will be on)
2) i also want the NAS to go standby, if it is not used for x hours and wake it up by Wake-On-Lan.

any help appreciated!

 

[SweetAndLow]

There are solutions for what you want to do but FreeNAS doesn't lend itself to work the way you want. The disk in the pool are almost always being written to for logs and other data. You can move these logs to a different disk if you want and that will let your pool disks sleep. FreeNAS puts your data on all your disks so you can't just have one with movies, this prevents you from spinning up just one drive to watch a movie. You can have multiple pools of drives but that would be silly and FreeNAS would not be the best solution for you. Wake-on-Lan has issues with freenas and most people give up trying to get it working.

 

[Hans1]

wow that was quick and precise!
great community!
looks like i gotta keep looking though.
thanks a lot!!!

 

[SweetAndLow]

one other thing i'll point out is what does low power usage actually mean to you? My server uses about 40watts at idle with fans on full and hdd spinning like normal.

 

[Hans1]

how many disks do you have? i have 8.
so i guess its 8x12=100watts for the disks (i read the 12watt per disk somewhere, never measured it).
my usage is about 4hours per day => 20x100Watt = 2kWh per day (is that about correct?)

originally i had a win7-pc with 8xhd, but no WOL => had no standby since the mb had WOL probs, just spindown.
so i bought a 8-bay syno-nas, it does the job, but it runs all 8 disks and i dont like spinning all disks on/off, when i just need to access a single disk (some disks i rarely use). the syno already saves me a lot of energy, its just that i worry about the disk-lifetime due to missing individual spin on/off and i dont really like the syno-system and progis. so i am currently looking for a better alternative.

 

[SweetAndLow]

how many disks do you have? i have 8.
so i guess its 8x12=100watts for the disks (i read the 12watt per disk somewhere, never measured it).
my usage is about 4hours per day => 20x100Watt = 2kWh per day (is that about correct?)

originally i had a win7-pc with 8xhd, but no WOL => had no standby since the mb had WOL probs, just spindown.
so i bought a 8-bay syno-nas, it does the job, but it runs all 8 disks and i dont like spinning all disks on/off, when i just need to access a single disk (some disks i rarely use). the syno already saves me a lot of energy, its just that i worry about the disk-lifetime due to missing individual spin on/off and i dont really like the syno-system and progis. so i am currently looking for a better alternative.

I have 6 wd red disks.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

i watch a movie, only movie-drive will wake up, the rest stays asleep

If you want this kind of behavior you might look at unRAID.

 

[Hans1]

okay thx so far, i will measure the true energy consumption first, looks like my theoretical calculation is way off ..
will have a look into unRAID too ..

 

[Glorious1]

If you only have one pool in FreeNAS, then right, you can't really sleep any disks because that pool will be getting written to constantly by the system. But you can have that pool fairly small, and have another one for media and things. Then you can set the drives in the media pool to sleep after 20 minutes or so of inactivity. I have a backup pool that wakes up once a day to receive snapshots from the main pool, then the disks go back to sleep. I keep the main pool spinning 24-7 so it can receive Time Machine backups every hour from our laptops.

However, FreeNAS will randomly wake up that backup pool, or even individual drives on it, for no apparent reason. I monitor my disks sleep/wake status and temperature every half hour and log it. This unexpected wakeup is usually uncommon. So on many days, probably most, they'll only wake up the one time they're supposed to, but on some days they'll spin up in the middle of the night or in the afternoon when I'm not around. I have no idea why.