spinning down drives / drives never idle?

[Sander Jansen]

hey,
I would like to set freenas to spindown drives that are idle. Ive set it in the disk overvieuw and it seems to save it. Funny thing is that non of my disks are actually ever idle. there is a constant 300kib writhing. I have no idea where this is comming from. is tehre a way to find this out? ive tryed to force spindown a disk and imedeately after that check for the spindown status. it spins down fine... but within 5 seconds or less it spins up again.

Ive added a schreenshot of the disk usage.

Can this be a log or something that is conatant writing things?

 

[styno]

This has been asked and replied to before. Please do a forum search on 'system dataset'.
Edit: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-when-nas-has-been-idle-for-many-hours.54145/

 

[DrKK]

Also, for the record, none of us really spin down our drives. We turn all that off, and let the drives run.

The amount of power consumed/saved is minuscule. Almost 0. And the wear and tear on the hard-drive with the loading and unloading and the spinning up and spinning down, etc., not minuscule.

I don't suggest you "spin down" drives, sir.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Probably costs more to replace the drives that die prematurely than it cost in power to leave them running.

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[Sander Jansen]

Yea i was thinking about that aswell... but i use them in home for media and photos, gopro footage... i have 12 drives running in total and im using the for just a bit of the day... it saves me at least 50/60 watts when there off... that translates to about 8 euro each month... im running 2 tb drives (at the moment) and the are not expansive so if thy last more then 10 monthes then its cheaper to spin down...


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[joeschmuck]

Just checking the math here: 12 Drives each consuming ~5 watts more power when running (that is a typical estimate) = 60 watts per hour, times maybe a powered down time of 18 hours maximum = 1080 watts per day, times 30 days = 32,400 watts per month. That is 32KW. With a price of .16 euro per KW (the best chart I could find from late 2016) of power that = 5.184 euro.

So lets take this a step further and assume you set the drives to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity and you only use the drives for 1 minute a day. This means you could save 6.8832 euro.

My opinion is if you are looking for savings this small that you might as well just power off your machine between uses.

Looking at cost of a new 2TB drive: The 2TB drive I could find (I didn't look too hard) was at 60 euros and this was not a NAS drive, it was the cheapest thing you could buy. So I agree, a single drive failure could be overcome by the cost savings of sleeping the drives but that assumes only 1 drive fails prematurly. Also you should consider the warranty of the drive period to help overcome the cost.

Would I do it to save that cost? No way. My WD Reds have been running non-stop for over 4.5 years now and not a single problem from them.

So my advice is, if you really do want to save the money, power off the system when not in use. It will save you significantly more money than the drives alone. But from a point of view for drive longevity, If they are NAS drives, I'd run them non-stop.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Not only will the system dataset always be active but any jails will do the same thing.

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[Sander Jansen]

That is true... i didnt look at it that way...


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[danb35]

Not only will the system dataset always be active but any jails will do the same thing.

Of course, if you have a separate SSD pool for your jails, you can put the .system dataset on that as well. But that still doesn't address whether there's any real net benefit to spinning down the disks.

 

[Ericloewe]

What is probably a net benefit is to let the drives park their heads. Probably 1W less power, reduced risk of head crashes and at 300s idle timer that's an absolute worst-case of ~6 years before the drives' rated load cycle count is exhausted.

Of course, it's only useful if you already have the mirrored SSDs anyway. Otherwise, there's little point to adding the mirrored SSDs just to park the heads.

 

[joeschmuck]

The OP didn't specify the drives nor any other hardware so we don't really know if the drives can be manipulated to their desire.