HD spindown - ATAIDLE not supported

[fisheater]

Hi all,

Just working my way though my first setup of FN - it has been good stuff.

I have not seen much info on the 'ataidle: the device does not support advanced power management' issue.

I have set my RAIDz1 to spin down 20 min and advanced power management to 1. However they stay smoking hot and dont seem to ever go into suspend or stop spinning. My work around for now has been to add a chassis fan blowing air into the box over the HDs and one on the back extracting the air.

Is this a FN/BSD issue or my noobish setup of the options to spin them down.

Thanks to all how read this an make suggestions. This forum has been a great help setting up my NAS!

Thanks,

FE

 

[praecorloth]

It's possible that the feature is disabled in the BIOS. I believe that's going to be a part of ACPI, and likely that will be what is referenced in the BIOS if you have the option to play with it at all. Make sure it's enabled.

 

[Milhouse]

fisheater, are your disks connected to your motherboard disk controller or a separate "add-in" controller (LSI, Adaptec etc.)?

You might want to check this thread - I posted a script which would spin down non-ATAIDLE compatible drives, it's a work in progress but if it works for you I might be able to move it further along to something useful.

 

[joeschmuck]

Unfortunately once you set the time you must reboot for the setting to become active. I have asked the GUI be changed and make it active immediately. You can do it manually of course which is instant gratification. If you have an I/O card you can use the manual option to test to see if it will work or fail. Check out that thread you were referred to. Lots of good info there.

Your drives shouldn't get "smoking hot" even if they run constantly. If they are then you do need to fix the air circulation because heat will destroy your drives fast. My drives for instance are mounted in the case skipping a drive bay so I have lots of clearance. The case side is open air with a pleated air filter to enhance the cooling. Nope, no fans over my drives. When you stack the drives on top of each other you need forced air to keep them cool. Okay, I'm done preaching.

-Mark

 

[fisheater]

Thanks for all your quick replies. My MoBo has 5 SATA ports, no PCI card at the moment. I will try your suggestions and get back to you, thanks for you insight.

As for the physical setup, I agree. I am not sure why the HDs are so tightly packed in such a big case. There are 7 HD slots and there is only a few mm between them. Not sure why they are not spaced a bit further apart. I have the drives seperated by one dock and will look at some other passive cooling methods.

 

[fisheater]

Update, mark as solved.

Recently I was getting this msg:

Failed SMART usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel

My HDs seem to spin down. After a period of inactivity, if I access the NAS I can hear them spin up. Why the get so hot, I am unable to say.

Here is my work around. 1. spread the disks out with an empty space between each of them - I bought two blanks for my optical disk slots. 2. I have a small case fan blowing air into the case over the HDs, and a fan on the other side exiting air from the case.

No error msgs now. I'll try and disconnect the intake fan and see how the temp goes.

Thanks for your insight.

FE

 

[joeschmuck]

Glad you were able to solve the problem. As I'm certain you are aware of, heat is the #1 killer of hard drives, and the #2 is when one slips out of my hands and hits the hard floor :)