NumberSix
Contributor
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2021
- Messages
- 188
Hi
I have some thoughts on trying to get spindown to work in TrueNAS.
I have wanted to get my HD's to spin down under TrueNAS since before I installed it. The promise of that facility was important to me. After some extensive investigation, reading almost everything I can find on the topic in this forum, and after hours of tedius experiment, I'm going to stick my neck out and say - it flat out doesn't work.
What this post is not about: I hear all the opinions that say you shouldn't spin down a drive, it shortens their lifespan etc, and although that may well be true, I want to set all that aside. I am just focused on the observation that it's a facility that's offered in the GUI and something my pattern of usage would see as a benefit, not to mention the green aspect of it, so - arguments about what's best is not is not what this is about so I thought I'd head all that off at the pass and just focus on the practicalities.
Following advice on this forum and elsewhere, I set Storage/Discs/Hard drive 1 to Level 127, Force HDD standby, and HDD standby (time) to 5 (mins) - I am sitting here testing this remember! As is often reported, this didn't work. I define not working as both not spining down, or spinning down only to spin up again a couple of minutes later. On further reading, I became aware of the impact of writes to the system and the antics of plugins in keeping the drives from spinning down. So I bought a SDD to put the System on and also move the jail and (both) my plugins to. That should deal with that issue, right? Wrong. The disks still only spin down for a couple of minutes then wake right back up again. Lastly, I played around with the poorly documented "S.M.A.R.T. extra options". There's a darth of relevant examples but I played around with most permutations of -n standby, -n standby,0, prefaced sometimes with -d ata, -d, sata, and even -d marvell. I might as well have tried -please and -pretty please for all the impact these had.
Next, I tried switching off the plugins - the plugins that were jailed on an SSD by now. That made an impressive amount of no difference too, but by now I'm willing to try facing south and reciting Black Sabbath lyrics backwards if there's a chance it will make disks spindown & stay spun down.
Finally, I took the nuclear option. I turned off SMART. Completely. Guess what??! Spin down!. Spin down that stays spun down. This tells me that SMART is, without doubt, the elemenent here that's causing spin down to fail. It also tells me that all of the controls in the GUI are powerless to stop it (except for the Off switch). So here's the gauntlet I'm going to throw down; I'll say something definitive about spinning down disks with TrueNAS. Spindown does not meanigfully work, no matter what you do, unless you're prepared to switch off SMART completely. I can't tell you how much I hope that provokes someone who knows differently and can explain how, to step forward and, well, do that thing!
[EDIT] It turns out I am completely correct in my assertion. You have to switch SMART off. All other config changes are fully ineffective.
Meanwhile I'm thinking 'how vital is SMART anyway'? All my disks in the last decade have had it, and it never results in any warnings about disk failure - you find out they are dead when they die is the rule. I don't have the time to pour over logs looking for exotic warning signs if that's what's needed to benefit from SMART, so maybe this is one heresy worth considering as the price of a working spindown option.
Food for thought I hope.
I have some thoughts on trying to get spindown to work in TrueNAS.
I have wanted to get my HD's to spin down under TrueNAS since before I installed it. The promise of that facility was important to me. After some extensive investigation, reading almost everything I can find on the topic in this forum, and after hours of tedius experiment, I'm going to stick my neck out and say - it flat out doesn't work.
What this post is not about: I hear all the opinions that say you shouldn't spin down a drive, it shortens their lifespan etc, and although that may well be true, I want to set all that aside. I am just focused on the observation that it's a facility that's offered in the GUI and something my pattern of usage would see as a benefit, not to mention the green aspect of it, so - arguments about what's best is not is not what this is about so I thought I'd head all that off at the pass and just focus on the practicalities.
Following advice on this forum and elsewhere, I set Storage/Discs/Hard drive 1 to Level 127, Force HDD standby, and HDD standby (time) to 5 (mins) - I am sitting here testing this remember! As is often reported, this didn't work. I define not working as both not spining down, or spinning down only to spin up again a couple of minutes later. On further reading, I became aware of the impact of writes to the system and the antics of plugins in keeping the drives from spinning down. So I bought a SDD to put the System on and also move the jail and (both) my plugins to. That should deal with that issue, right? Wrong. The disks still only spin down for a couple of minutes then wake right back up again. Lastly, I played around with the poorly documented "S.M.A.R.T. extra options". There's a darth of relevant examples but I played around with most permutations of -n standby, -n standby,0, prefaced sometimes with -d ata, -d, sata, and even -d marvell. I might as well have tried -please and -pretty please for all the impact these had.
Next, I tried switching off the plugins - the plugins that were jailed on an SSD by now. That made an impressive amount of no difference too, but by now I'm willing to try facing south and reciting Black Sabbath lyrics backwards if there's a chance it will make disks spindown & stay spun down.
Finally, I took the nuclear option. I turned off SMART. Completely. Guess what??! Spin down!. Spin down that stays spun down. This tells me that SMART is, without doubt, the elemenent here that's causing spin down to fail. It also tells me that all of the controls in the GUI are powerless to stop it (except for the Off switch). So here's the gauntlet I'm going to throw down; I'll say something definitive about spinning down disks with TrueNAS. Spindown does not meanigfully work, no matter what you do, unless you're prepared to switch off SMART completely. I can't tell you how much I hope that provokes someone who knows differently and can explain how, to step forward and, well, do that thing!
[EDIT] It turns out I am completely correct in my assertion. You have to switch SMART off. All other config changes are fully ineffective.
Meanwhile I'm thinking 'how vital is SMART anyway'? All my disks in the last decade have had it, and it never results in any warnings about disk failure - you find out they are dead when they die is the rule. I don't have the time to pour over logs looking for exotic warning signs if that's what's needed to benefit from SMART, so maybe this is one heresy worth considering as the price of a working spindown option.
Food for thought I hope.
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