How to tell if your HD's are going to stand-by or not.

[helloha]

I'm having doubts if my HD's are going in standby or not.

They are all connected on a dell perc h310 with an H16 firmware.

Under disks I have:

Transfer mode: auto
HDD stanby: 20
Advanced power management: disabled
acoustic level: disabled
enable smart: true

When there are no volumes mounted I can hear some sporadic disk activity, some clicks every 5 min or so.

Is there any way to know wether the disks are in standby?

Cheers,
K

 

[marbus90]

With FreeNAS 9.3 and the .system dataset on the pool they won't spindown. I would disable it anyway as the disks may break faster.

 

[helloha]

Aha I see,

What would you disable? Move the .system dataset to a dedicated disk? Or disable spin down?

K.

 

[marbus90]

er, disabling the spin down.

 

[Tywin]

What would you disable? Move the .system dataset to a dedicated disk? Or disable spin down?

One popular rule of thumb for whether spinning disks down is better or worse for lifetime is "once per day"; i.e. if they are going to be spinning up more often than that, you may be better off leaving them spinning continuously. Note that there is not a lot of actual data on this, just a lot of anecdotes. YMMV.