HD Standby with APM (at Maximum Performance)?

[knotworking]

I've been wondering about these settings since I was on FreeNAS 7, I've tweaked them over the years but never really been clear on how they interact. I originally thought that I needed to select an APM setting that included "with Standby" if I wanted my drives to standby after the time I set in "Hard disk standby time." I tried the various APM settings, but I was never happy with the disk response times, songs would click/pause/stutter during playback and any file access would always involve waiting for a second or three. "Maximum performance, maximum power usage" was the only APM setting that gave me the performance I was happy with. It also "seems" to still allow the drives to still go into Standby after the time I set, but I've never really been sure about that (the server is in a back room). In my particular case, the server is active from about 7:00AM until 8:00PM each day, I've always wanted to minimize the heat & power loss during the night when the server is idle.

I've just upgraded my build to 10.1, so again I was setting these and I thought I might ask here for some clarity. How do "Standby Time" and "Advance Power Management" interact? Does one overrule the other? How does SMART affect disks in Standby, when it is enabled?

From my readings over the years, I think there are a lot of people out there who are wondering the same as me on these settings, but there does not seem to be a definitive explanation.