HDD standby times not as expected

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isaac82

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2012
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I'm quite new to FreeNAS and still learning/tweaking my first system. I've been trying the HDD Standby settings but am not seeing the results I'd expect.

To diagnose what's going on, I've run the following test:

1) Of my four disks, set each to a different standby time from the gui: 5, 10, 30 60.
For all, APM and Accoustic disabled, smart enabled.

2) Reboot

3) Run a script (from this thread http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?2068-How-to-find-out-if-a-drive-is-spinning-down-properly) that prints every 30s whether each drive is in stanby or spinning. I've put the script in /tmp and redirect the output to /tmp/results. Running nohup in the backgroup.

4) Access the drives to 'reset' any standby timer

5) Wait a couple of hours then check results.

What I find is that the first two drives both go to sleep after 10 minutes:
Code:
time: 20:42:32
pass0: SPINNING
pass1: SPINNING
pass2: SPINNING
pass3: SPINNING

...

time: 20:51:32
pass0: IDLE
pass1: IDLE
pass2: SPINNING
pass3: SPINNING


Two hours later and the state is the same.

So standby time to results mapping is:

5 = standby after 10
10 = standby after 10
30 = never standby
60 = never standby

My first question is whether FreeNAS is setting the ataidle settings correctly. Is this command logged in a logfile somewhere? Output on startup?
If it is being set correctly, is it the drives not supporting all the different sleep times? They're 2TB WD Green.

Reason I want standby is I'd like to leave the FreeNAS 24/7 and I'll only access it evenings and weekend and then only infrequently (so could go days weeks without access). I'd prefer to save some power and some wear and tear. With my usage I'd have thought spin down after 30 mins or 60 mins would be a good idea.

My specs:

Code:
  • FreeNAS 8.3
  • HP ProLiant Microserver N40
  • 4x 2TB WD Green HDD in RaidZ1 with single volume/dataset
  • 8GB RAM
  • PowerD not enabled in advanced settings


Here's camcontrol identify for the first drive (others should all be the same):

Code:
pass0: <WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0 51.0AB51> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
pass0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)

protocol              ATA/ATAPI-8 SATA 3.x
device model          WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
firmware revision     51.0AB51
serial number         WD-WCAZAF516841
WWN                   50014ee25c883c98
cylinders             16383
heads                 16
sectors/track         63
sector size           logical 512, physical 4096, offset 0
LBA supported         268435455 sectors
LBA48 supported       3907029168 sectors
PIO supported         PIO4
DMA supported         WDMA2 UDMA6

Feature                      Support  Enabled   Value           Vendor
read ahead                     yes      yes
write cache                    yes      yes
flush cache                    yes      yes
overlap                        no
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)   no       no
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)   yes              32 tags
SMART                          yes      yes
microcode download             yes      yes
security                       yes      no
power management               yes      yes
advanced power management      no       no
automatic acoustic management  no       no
media status notification      no       no
power-up in Standby            yes      no
write-read-verify              no       no
unload                         no       no
free-fall                      no       no
data set management (TRIM)     no


BTW anyone know what 'power-up in Standby' is? I guess I should probably see if the firmware is up to date, but I'm reluctant to as I think it requires windows to update.

Thanks in advacne to anyone who can point me in the direction of some useful info or provide any assistance.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
Power-up in standby is just what it sounds like. When the drive powers up, it doesn't start the platters spinning. If you have a system with two dozen drives and they all spin up at the same time ... power surge.
 

isaac82

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2012
Messages
16
Thanks. Not a feature that will help me then.

Bit of googling turned up console.log and dmesg.today, I'll have a look at these and see if there's anything.

I guess the next thing for me to try is manually using ataidle to see if it works with say 30 mins. If it does then it must be the way ix-ataidle is written that's wrong, otherwise it must be ataidle itself.
 

Stephens

Patron
Joined
Jun 19, 2012
Messages
496
To test this stuff, I didn't use scripts or anything. I set the drives to spin down after 5 minutes of inactivity. Then I watched the power usage of my UPS. Sure enough, it dropped from 60 to 20 watts. Good enough for me. I used 5 minutes because I didn't want to wait hours to test this stuf. The thing is, when SMART was enabled, things changed a bit. You might have to play with that. For instance, disable the SMART service completely just as a test and see if you get more consistent results. There are options for SMART so that it won't wake up sleeping drives, but it's easy to get wrong and I'm not sure the options work correctly with all drives.
 

isaac82

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2012
Messages
16
Yeah I keep meaning to get a socket power meter. I think it's unlikely to be the standby test that's wrong though, why would two drives report standby and the other two not?
 

raphaabreu

Cadet
Joined
Mar 16, 2013
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