HDD standby issue (FreeNAS 8.3.0 / PATA)

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cyberjunk

Cadet
Joined
Dec 11, 2012
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Dear community,

I recently installed my first FreeNAS 8.3.0 system on old Asus A8N-SLI mainboard and I have to say:
Great work and thanks to all the developers, except for one thing it's working perfect :)

My problem is:
I'm using a set of old 500GB IDE harddrives (ada0, ada1, ada2, ada3).
So it's 4x WDC WD5000AAKB drives running 2x RAID1.
But I can't get the system to auto-standby these drives correctly.

I read about the useful shell tool "ataidle",
I can also standby the drives manually by executing:

ataidle -s ada0
ataidle -s ada1
...

They spindown and they also don't wake up for at least the next 24h (haven't tested more).
So there seems to be no periodical access preventing the standby or waking them up again.

But neither executing:
ataidle -S 10 ada0
...

nor setting the HDD standby to 10 minutes in the FreeNAS Web-UI show any effect after the 10min interval has elapsed.
The drives simply stay on. :(

I didn't set any APM values, as "ataidle" states it's not supported by these drives.

[root@media] /# ataidle ada0
Model: WDC WD5000AAKB-00H8A0
Serial: WD-WCASY3840646
Firmware Rev: 05.04E05
ATA revision: ATA-8
LBA 48: yes
Geometry: 16383 cyls, 16 heads, 63 spt
Capacity: 465GB
SMART Supported: yes
SMART Enabled: yes
Write Cache Supported: yes
Write Cache Enabled: yes
APM Supported: no
AAM Supported: yes
AAM Enabled: no
Vendor Recommended AAM: 1

So I'm basically wondering now: What triggers the spindown (checks if the timeout elapsed)?
A cron job? The driver?

Your help is appreciated :smile:
 

Stephens

Patron
Joined
Jun 19, 2012
Messages
496
If you have SMART monitoring enabled, disable it (temporarily) and retry your "-S 10" test. You should be able to handle spindown via the GUI without using shell commands.
 

cyberjunk

Cadet
Joined
Dec 11, 2012
Messages
2
I don't know what it exactly was, but it is working as expected by now...
I can recommend looking up explicitly what feature are supported by your drive (APM/AAM/...) and don't set unsupported ones in the GUI, but don't know if it matters actually.
At least I'm happy :smile:

Thanks for this great piece of open source software.
 
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