WD Red Standby and Power

[Savell Martin]

Hey guys,

Im wondering whats the best settings for my WD Reds.
I heard somewhere it best to leave them spinning all the time.
And other places to put them to sleep as they are not always in use.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for HDD settings?
Standby time and advanced power settings?
Also what about acoustic settings?

 

[Ericloewe]

Just leave them as they are and you won't have a problem (beyond the standard distribution of hard drive problems).

 

[Savell Martin]

What is default?
As I changed it ages ago to never sleep.

Now I'm not using it so much so wondering is sleep would be better but what are the settings to use?

 

[rogerh]

Many people think it is best for disks just to spin along at constant temperature, torque etc. Some people are really keen to save a few watts of power, and some other people believe (there is probably no evidence either way) that if the server is not in use for many hours every day it is best to spin down the drives.

It is fairly certain that it is best not to spin them down if this would result in them turning on and off many times a day (a lightly used home server that is on all the time and does the occasional backup etc. at night for instance).

Otherwise it is your choice. A respectable body of opinion, which includes me, thinks it best to to leave off the standby, acoustic and power management settings in the GUI and just let a disk be a disk; and stay spinning.

 

[DrKK]

Concur. All of us (me, Cyberjock, etc.etc.etc.) have the disks "always on", no AAM/APM, no spindown.

After all, they *are* NAS drives.

 

[DylanT]

Doesn't freenas poll the disks like every 10 seconds anyway? So as long the spin down is set longer than that, they'll never spin down.

 

[SweetAndLow]

No it doesn't poll anything. It will write to the .system dataset and that is probably what you are referring to.

 

[rogerh]

I presume that people who want to spin down the disks without shutting down the server will put their .system dataset on a separate disk from their main pool.

 

[DylanT]

SweetAndLow, do those writes happen at a set interval somewhere between every 5 and 10 seconds (haven't timed it in a while)? I notice that my drive activity lights all blink once in unison every few seconds.

 

[SweetAndLow]

SweetAndLow, do those writes happen at a set interval somewhere between every 5 and 10 seconds (haven't timed it in a while)? I notice that my drive activity lights all blink once in unison every few seconds.

Yes

 

[Savell Martin]

Thanks for the advice guys.
I have not spun down the drive, appreciate the backup :)