Powermanagement for todays hard drives (WD Red Pro)?

[ObiTobi]

Hi,

I am in the process of replacing all my hard drives (5x4TB -> raidz2-0; 2x6TB -> mirror) to new/ modern drives WD Red Pro (5x16 TB, 2x 14TB)
My old drives are configured with:

HDD Standby -> Always ON
Adv. Power Management -> Disabled

Does it make sense to leave it like this or should I change something?

Thanks

 

[chruk]

Leave as is, as far as I know most new drives dont support APM.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Playing with disk settings

I wonder about the available disk settings, which are safe to play around with and which should be avoided at all. I'm thinking of: HDD Standby (guessing always on) Advanced Power Management Acoustic Level In addition to suggested settings, what exactly does each do and how will it affect...

www.truenas.com

This is how to check if your drives will support APM.

 

[ObiTobi]

Great, I will check it later.

 

[Chris Moore]

Does it make sense to leave it like this or should I change something?

It doesn't make sense to spin the drives down because all the start / stop cycles make extra wear on the drive mechanism that make for early failure of the motor. The system I manage at work has 35PB of storage and we don't ever spin the drives down. Most of them have been running for seven years. Just get a good quality drive and it will last. I recommend the Seagate Exos model drives. They are usually less expensive than the Iron Wolf and they are made to a better standard with a five year warranty.

 

[ObiTobi]

Here output from "camcontrol identify" command

Code:

Feature                      Support  Enabled   Value           Vendor
read ahead                     yes      yes
write cache                    yes      yes
flush cache                    yes      yes
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)   yes              32 tags
NCQ Priority Information       yes
NCQ Non-Data Command           yes
NCQ Streaming                  yes
Receive & Send FPDMA Queued    yes
NCQ Autosense                  yes
SMART                          yes      yes
security                       yes      no
power management               yes      yes
microcode download             yes      yes
advanced power management      yes      no      254/0xFE
automatic acoustic management  no       no
media status notification      no       no
power-up in Standby            yes      no
write-read-verify              no       no
unload                         no       no
general purpose logging        yes      yes
free-fall                      no       no
sense data reporting           yes      yes
extended power conditions      yes      no
device statistics notification no       no
Data Set Management (DSM/TRIM) no
Trusted Computing              no
encrypts all user data         no
Sanitize                       yes              overwrite,
Sanitize - commands allowed    yes
Sanitize - antifreeze lock     no
Host Protected Area (HPA)      yes      no      31251759104/31251759104
HPA - Security                 yes      no
Accessible Max Address Config  no

APM is supported.



I think for the drives it is indeed better if they run all the time. The box is at my house and my favorite thing would be to find a mechanism that the whole device stays off between 01:00 and 06:00. I'll have to think about how to implement it.

 

[Chris Moore]

You could create a scheduled task to shutdown the system. That would give you a graceful shutdown and is relatively easy to setup.
Some, but not all, system BIOS firmware support having the system turn on / boot at a scheduled time.
This would save power when there was nobody home to use the system. The only problem I see is that you normally schedule things like scrubs and scans on the disks during those times when nobody is home. That way the system is available for use when home and the maintenance scans are done when people are not there to be anoyed by any performance hit that the scans would cause.

 

[Chris Moore]

I think for the drives it is indeed better if they run all the

I tried it with one of my past builds. Having the drives stop and start. Most failures happen when power is restored. If the system is up all the time, it reduces the failure rate. When we are going to shutdown the system at work for maintenence, we order a pile of spares so we can fix all the problem that happen when it is brought back online.