SOLVED How to make 500W HDDs spin down or draw less power?

[Sawtaytoes]

I setup a 60 HDD zpool and man is it sucking power.

On idle, it's 500W. On load, it's 510W.

I bought HGST Helium drives, so I'm assuming that spinning them up and down multiple times a day could potentially be safer than doing that with consumer drives, but I'm curious what I should do.

Is there a lower power state for HDDs when they're idle?

TrueNAS has tons of power options available, but I'm not sure what I should be choosing. These drives can be written to every hour when a snapshot occurs in my main zpool, but I rarely change data. This is almost exclusively a read-only dataset.

EDIT
I'm talking about what settings I need for this screen:

 

[Jailer]

The safe way....get a power supply that can handle the load.

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/proper-power-supply-sizing-guidance.38811/

 

[joeschmuck]

rueNAS has tons of power options available, but I'm not sure what I should be choosing. These drives can be written to every hour when a snapshot occurs in my main zpool, but I rarely change data. This is almost exclusively a read-only dataset.

You have conflicting information which makes providing you an answer difficult but I'll try.

Read the TrueNAS User Guide on the drive power levels. There are a lot of threads here about spinning down your drives, that is the only way you will save an appreciable amount of power. Each drive draws about 5 watts of power as a general rule for estimating power requirements. You would need to look at the specific datasheets to know what the drive uses while running vs sleeping for exact values. But if you sleep your drives and every hour they spin back up for a snapshot, even if it's 1 byte, that is generally not recommended here in the forums. Again, lots of stuff here in the forums that discuss that.

I bought HGST Helium drives, so I'm assuming that spinning them up and down multiple times a day could potentially be safer than doing that with consumer drives

Not that I'm aware of. Here is a blog that explains it in more detail.

I setup a 60 HDD zpool and man is it sucking power.

I hope it's a business paying that bill. 60 drives is a lot and it will consume power. And you didn't factor in the air conditioning bill .

 

[Sawtaytoes]

My PSUs are redundant 1200W each. Plenty of power for these guys.

I want them to use less power. I have 125 SSDs in another chassis, and the whole thing including the mobo, CPU, etc uses 400W on idle and 580W when very loaded. That's more reasonable because it's a lot of stuff including the server itself.

What's not reasonable is the crazy power draw from those HDDs. I only recently put it on its own UPS, and that's when I noticed it.

Is there a way I can spin them down when not in use, so they use less power per hour?

 

[somethingweird]

Convert your HDD to SSD. -- HDD has moving parts - they need power to move them. That said 7200 rpm drives use slightly more power than 5400 rpm.

 

[Sawtaytoes]

I have an SSD pool, but it's not cost-effective. The price difference is $30K SSDs for the same capacity of $2K HDDs. I wanted some cheaper storage, so I bought a bunch of HDDs. I just didn't realize they'd use so much power.

There's this Power Management area in TrueNAS. I figured someone would know more about what settings I could safely use for the longevity of my HDDs vs how much power they draw:

 

[winnielinnie]

What is the role of the system?

If it's simply to receive backups on occasion, then you can probably get away with spinning down the drives. Otherwise, it's probably not worth it. You might end up using approximately the same amount of daily power, yet with extra wear on the drives.

 

[Sawtaytoes]

It's 100% only backups for the HDD zpool.

Even the 128 (no spindown) mode is fine with me.

But when I run change the setting, I get "not supported":

Code:

# hdparm -B 128 /dev/sdap
/dev/sdap:
 setting Advanced Power Management level to 0x80 (128)
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  72 05 20 00 00 00 00 10 02 06 00 00 c0 00 00 00 03 02 00 21 80 02 f8 21 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 APM_level      = not supported

TrueNAS lets me set it in the UI, and doesn'st show any sort of warning:

But even still, I don't have enough inside to know how this works.

I saw this post on Reddit about making Hitachi and HGST drives compatible with APM: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarde...nced_power_management_feature_tools_and_load/

Is it legit?

And this post is says HGST drives work with APM and can use it to run in a lower RPM mode:

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

All of these could be great for me provided I could get them working.

 

[winnielinnie]

Even the 128 (no spindown) mode is fine with me.

If you're not going to spindown the drives, then you won't get any meaningful power savings anyways.

Your most meaningful savings in power (hence cost and electricity) would be the power down the entire system, and only power it up to run your backups. This will turn off everything: HDDs, CPU, fans, board. That's a drop from 510W to 0W. Way more significant than a drop from 510W to 500W.

 

[joeschmuck]

The OP said an hourly snapshot was being created, possibly. In my opinion this system is then not suitable for spinning down. As I said above, the forum is full of threads about spinning the drives down and I believe the resource section has a script. Instead of asking the same question again and hoping someone just re-enters all the same information others have posted over the past several years (many times), please read the forums. You will find the script and good information. But if you have hourly snapshots, I do not recommend it. But give it a try and make your own decision. I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm trying to teach a man how to fish.

 

[Sawtaytoes]

Looks like Advanced Power Management doesn't do anything anyway. I had it set to 128 for the past few days.

These power values are pretty stable at ~510W:

Looks like I have a permanent half-kW of power until I decide to swap these out for SSDs.

My power rates are a fixed $0.08/kWh. That's about $361/yr.

Seems like a lot, but it's way cheaper than cloud storage and for this storage volume, it's also 4 times less than buying SSDs (even consumer models).

I'm satisfied for now so long as my electricity rates stay the same; although, they'll probably go up with inflation and the rising cost of powering electric cars in homes, so this might only be a 2-5 year solution.

 

[sretalla]

If you really insist on spinning down drives, the built-in functions are not enough, you need to use this:

HDD Spindown Timer

Disk spindown has always been an issue for various TrueNAS / FreeNAS users. This script utilizes iostat to detect I/O operations (reads, writes) on each disk. If a disk was neither read nor written for a given period of time, it is considered...

www.truenas.com

Making sure the system dataset isn't on the HDD pool will be an essential point too.

 

[LarsR]

Can i just say that i'm pretty jealous of your prices? Here in germany i'm paying €0,32/kWh...

 

[Davvo]

Can i just say that i'm pretty jealous of your prices? Here in germany i'm paying €0,32/kWh...

Your government in the last few years made a couple really bad choices regarding energy... here in Italy today we pay around €0,15/kWh. It would be an interesting thread for the OT section.

But yeah, 0,08/kWh is a steal.