SOLVED Unwanted spindown occurring

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seven

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Hi,

Long post for a short problem, but I wanted to be as clear as possible. The tl;dr version is in blue :)

I've so far managed to avoid posting any questions regarding my n00b FreeNAS 9.2.0 installation, mostly thanks to this forum. My apologies in advance if I have made a schoolboy error - I know how annoying it can be to have to answer the same questions over and over - however, as much as I have searched on here, the FreeNAS docs and Googled for answers elsewhere I'm not able to find a solution to this problem.

My setup is fairly simple with 2 x UFS volumes on two drives. I have avoided ZFS and zRAID because my mobo/RAM are non-ECC and I don't have much RAM capacity anyway. My drives are Seagate 'NAS' models ST2000VN000 and ST4000VN000. I have three CIFS shares set up, two from the 2TB drive and one from the 4TB. At the moment I'm testing with a single client (W7) but ultimately there will be a few more (also W7). The shares are not mounted to drive letters in the test client's OS; I access them solely by typing their UNC paths/navigating the "network" tree in Windows Explorer.

I decided initially that, because of my use case (home, infrequent, low intensity), I wanted to use drive spindown; mostly because of the noise consideration. Since then however I have realised two things. First: my usage is more frequent than I'd anticipated. Second: the test client seems to be polling the FreeNAS box whenever a file explorer or any kind of file open/save etc. dialog is displayed. These "polls" seem to be causing the FreeNAS drives to spin up even when I don't intend to access the server. The bottom line is that between these two things, the drives are being spun up at least 5 or 6 times a day rather than the 3 or 4 times a week I'd initially planned for.

Going by the numerous threads here on the subject of drive spindown (sorry to add yet another!) I've concluded that there's a good chance the above wouldn't do my drives' operational lifespan any favours, so I've decided to go back to 24x7, except whenever I'm away, at which time I'll just power the whole server down.

Anyway... having successfully got the drives to spin down via the web interface > Storage > View Disks and changing the 'Standby' and 'Advanced Power Management' settings accordingly, I now don't seem to be able to reverse that and get them to go back to spinning 24x7.

I have (supposedly) successfully reset both drives' Standby setting to 'Never' and APM to 254, as well as changing acoustic level setting for both to 'disabled'. The new settings have been accepted by FreeNAS but the drives still seem to be spinning down. Certainly I frequently hear what sounds like one or both of the drives spinning up when accessing the server from the Windows client, or whenever I log on to the FreeNAS web interface.

I've tried different APM settings, basically all the values that don't include spindown/standby in the description, i.e. 128, 192 and the current setting 254.

I've also tried a cold reboot but with no effect.

Any ideas what I might've missed or am doing wrong? Could it be that the drives aren't actually completely spun down and just going into some power saving "low-rpm" mode I don't know about? Presumably this shouldn't be the case if I've set APM to 254 and disabled acoustic level?
 

joeschmuck

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Disable APM as well (APM Disable, AL Disabled, HDD Standby Always On), save your settings and shutdown the machine, then power it back on. This will ensure your drives are loaded with your drive power settings. APM settings on drives may not work as expected.

EDIT: To re-emphasize, turn the power off, do not just reboot, it's not the same.
 

seven

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D'oh! Can't believe I didn't spot the "disabled" APM setting. Thank you!
 

warri

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Jun 6, 2011
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First of all, thanks for providing all necessary information and the tl;dr version. ;)

Somebody provided a nice script to check whether your drives actually spin down, check this thread:
How to find out if a drive is spinning down properly.

APM and Standby settings are only applied after a shutdown and restart, but you wrote that you already tried a cold reboot. An APM value of 255 should completely disable any power management. You can also set those values via command line, with camcontrol(8).

I'd check if the values are all set correctly (see below) and if the drives are spinning down at all (see script above).

You can list your devices with
Code:
camcontrol devlist


And then retrieve the current settings with
Code:
camcontrol identify adaX


and finally disable APM with
Code:
camcontrol cmd adaX -a "EF 85 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00


(I think at least the last command is correct, but better double check)

EDIT: Damn, should have gone for the simple approach. You guys were faster ;)
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
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Just to let you know, after FreeNAS 9.2.3.x the hard drive power management are immediate and you do not need to turn off your server.
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
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EDIT: Damn, should have gone for the simple approach. You guys were faster ;)

That happens to me a lot as well.
 
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