Moving to TrueNAS: Rotating/changing disks regularly & HDD spindown

[Xairoo]

Hi,

currently I am running a Xpenolgy NAS and a 2 bay Synology NAS. Planning to replace both with a single TrueNAS server for multiple reasons.

But I have two questions:

1.) Rotating/changing disks regularly
My current setup has multiple RAID1 volumes and two JBOD drives.

The thing is, that I rotate the 2 JBOD drives regularly. Having 4 JBOD drives in total. 2 in the NAS, 2 offsite placed in a safe place. Rsync will save data from my RAID1 volumes to these JBOD drives. This works perfectly with Synology.

1. Shutdown NAS
2. Place these two drives (1a & 2a) offsite
3. Put the two other drives (1b & 2b) from offsite in the NAS
4. Power NAS on
5. Shares for these drives should be accessible
6. Rsync will do what it should ;-)
7. After a week... this cycle starts again, but instead of disk A it will be B and the next week A instead of B and so on

This rotates weekly. So my backup would be 1 week old (which is okay).
I just want TrueNAS to automount these disks and the content should be accessible through a static path (like /volume1, /volume2, 3, ... @Synology).

Can this be done with TrueNAS without problems? Without writing a script for mounting or finding the disks (okay, that's an option, but no idea how TrueNAS is mounting these drives).

2.) HDD spindown
Synology is really bad when it comes to HDD spindown. Even with a setup without any apps running, strong firewall rules to prevent random access, wakes and so on. HDD will wake up too often. My NAS is a backup NAS and is running only at night for a few minutes/hours.

But I have a second NAS, just for Plex, running 24/7. But the disks (all or none) wake up "randomly" too (NAS is only for hosting the files, Plex server is running on a different device. I use automount to mount the share when I access the files with Plex and my firewall is blocking all traffic expect SMB for the Plex server and a SSH connection from an other IP).

Anyway... HDD Spindown Timer sounds great.

1. How often will TrueNAS check the drive temps? Sounds like this will spinup the drives.
2. Only the accessed drives will spinup and not all like @Synology?

Thanks! =)

 

[ChrisRJ]

Question 1: no

Question 2: Strongly discouraged due to causing excessive wear on the disks. Some people have done this, but TrueNAS is an enterprise NAS. HDD spin-down is never a requirement there. So much not, that even the HDD-internal timers for parking heads are typically configured with default values that might "kill" them when used in desktops.

 

[Xairoo]

I just have tested rotating/changing disks regularly with TrueNAS. It works very well.
Just created a pool for every disk that I will rotate. The pool based on the drive that is offsite is missing (of course), who cares.
TrueNAS will recognize the pool when the disk is inserted again. So it's just working.

Do you talk about desktop drives or a desktop system? I don't get it. Anyway, you could also run a desktop case and system as a server without any problems.

the HDD-internal timers for parking heads are typically configured with default values

Do you have a reference for this?

Funny that TrueNAS is available for none enterprise users and so many users aren't enterprise users. And as far as I could read, some of them use the HDD spindown without any problems.

Again: Do you have a good resource for your statement about the timers and the "might" killing? Please explain it a bit more detailed.
What I think: When forcing a spindown, the head will be parked. So that shouldn't be a problem at all.

Thanks!

 

[ChrisRJ]

I meant using enterprise drives in a desktop scenario. Or any other scenario where no access happens for more than e.g. 3-5 minutes. My Seagate Exos 16 TB by default park their heads when idle for a few minutes. This parking causes wear and by that "kills" drives; more precisely the probability for the drive to die goes up. In a enterprise scenario this is no problem,because the disks will never be idle for more than e.g. a minute (or even just a few seconds).

As to spin-down, yes that works for a while. But it also causes wear on HDDs and statistically reduces the lifetime. About a year ago Synology even mentioned that spin-down is not supported for Seagate Exos drives in their HCL.

 

[ChrisRJ]

As to references, Google will find you plenty