XigmaNAS

Hey all,

I'm still fairly new to nas4free and FreeBSD in general. I have my server up an running following all the excellent tutorials on this forum, I have a server with 16 hard drives. they are:

4 x WD10EURX (WD AV-GP) 1TB drives - Advanced Format

4 x ST1000VM002 (Seagate Pipeline HD) 1 TB drives - Advanced Format

4 x WD5000AADS (Caviar Green) 500GB drives

4 x WD5000AAKS (Caviar Blue) 500GB drives

I set all 16 drives to spindown after 60 minutes and set all the other power control options for full acoustic and minimum power during standby. All other drives spindown nicely except for the 4 Seagate Pipeline drives that show through web GUI as still spinning. I have tried everything i know, including the camcontrol commands. When i use for example: "camcontol standby ada1 -t 30", it actually says standby on the drive for literally one second, then goes right back to saying drive is spinning. All other drives stay on standby.

I would love to get some expert advice on this. I am also working on learning to use WDIDLE3 for my WD drives, but i wanted to fix the Seagate problem first if it was possible.

Thanks for any and all help!

some more information on your system would be helpfull.

what controller are you using?

Hey there,

Thanks for the reply! Ok sure thing. I am using the Marvell 88SE9215 AHCI SATA controller. You know the 4 port pcie x1 cards that recently became available about a year ago or so? I actually have three in my system along with using the 4 onboard SATA II ports for the WD10EURX's.

The breakdown of my drives look like this:

Marvell 88SE9215 AHCI SATA controller: 4 x Seagate Pipeline HD ST1000VM002 drives
Marvell 88SE9215 AHCI SATA controller: 4 x WD Caviar Green WD5000AADS drives
Marvell 88SE9215 AHCI SATA controller: 4 x WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS drives
Onboard Motherboard 4 SATA II ports: 4 x WD Green WD10EURX drives

All other 12 drives (WD) spindown with no problems as set in power control options for each drive.

My motherboard is an MSI Z77A-G45. (I freaking love this board) It has 4 onboard SATA II ports and 2 onboard SATA III ports.

I use the two SATA III ports for a low profile DVD-RW drive, and the 2nd port for maybe a possible later zil/l2arc ssd.(Currently empty at the moment)

The motherboard has 3 usable pcie x1 slots as well as 2 pcie x8 slots and a x4 pcie slot. I use the x4 slot for a dual gigabit intel lan card.

I am using the 2 x pcie x8 slots for external SAS cards. (separate external box) they are not in use at the moment though.

Looking at my setup on paper, it just occurred to me that i could do something. do you think i should switch out the 4 WD10EURX drives on the onboard ports for the Seagate Pipelines? Will that work? I will try and post back. If it does, then i can just leave the WD10EURX drives on the Marvell controller and put the Seagates on the onboard ports! Hopefully it works?

Thanks in advance for any and all replies. Will keep trying to research if it works, but until then will await your expert advice.

Oh, by the way, this forum ROCKS!

they are on an ahci controller so they should spin down the same.

use the camcontrol programm to manually put the drives into standby and see if that works.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?quer ... tion=8&n=1

you are not running any programs the could interfere with the shutdown?
like a dlna server

Hey Boss,

Yeah, your right, i do have minidlna installed, but i just can't see how it could cause just the 4 Seagate drives to keep spinning. i actually have one music directory mapped to minidlna, but it is on a pool of 4 WD x 500gb drives, and even those drives spindown after the 60 mins i set.

I actually used the camcontrol program commands through the web gui interface, then i thought i better use ssh with putty. i did so and that's where i see the seagate drives say standby for like 2 seconds, then they go right back to spinning. I am not sure why though. All my other drives spindown excellently.

Besides minidlna, i only have extended GUI installed. No other extensions or software installed.

Do you think its a firmware setting in the seagates? if so, can it be changed like in WDIDLE3? I have been reading that it appears difficult for seagate drives to spindown. Please let me know. Its late now, (2:35am) but i will switch out the seagates and put them on the onboard ports first thing in the am and post back.

Thank you so much for working with me with this Boss, you are a true helper!
As always, any help or info is appreciated!

try using these commands to see if any program is accessing files on the drives.

http://lserinol.blogspot.de/2009/01/lso ... eebsd.html