HDD spindown

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 29 Oct 2015 00:48

i have 4 HDD's in my nas and none of them seem to be spinning down. whats going on? what can be stopping them?

more info,
4 drives used in 2 mirror zfs setups, all drives are set to spin down after 60 minutes, power level 1. nether mirror seem to be spinning down.
one mirror has data for CIFS/SMB and the destination for transmission once downloads complete, also the webserver user the data on this drive.
the other mirror has the transmission temp download, is where the extended-webgui is installed, is the location of the webserver. the watch folders and config for transmission is on a USB drive along with the config for DLNA/UPNP.
The watch folder and config for transmission are help on a usbdrive along with the DLNA/UPnP conf settings.

ive tried turning all services except SSH and dynamic DNS and leaving it at leave an hour and the drives still haven't spun down.

It has been working my previous versions of nas4free (think i started with 9.0 or possibly 8.?) ,Any thoughts please anyone!!!

Post by **b0ssman** » 29 Oct 2015 07:15

you signature says you have a mini sas controller. if the devices are daX instea of adaX you need to use
http://www.noresult.net/freebsd/spindown/
manually to set up spin down for scsi.

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 29 Oct 2015 08:38

thanks for the reply, i believe the are ada that are on the motherboard and sata card, from disk management all the HDD are ada 0-3 plus one da which is the os/usb flashdrive

Parkcomm · Post by **Parkcomm** » 29 Oct 2015 08:42

Or possibly the disks are not idle - I assume you know how to use top and find:

Code: Select all

find /mnt/ -atime 1h -ls

will tell you which files were accessed in the last hour
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?find(1)

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top -m io -HSztja -o total

will tell you what processes are accessing I/O
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?top(1)

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 29 Oct 2015 12:35

No I wasn't but am now thanks. Given me something to work on.

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 29 Oct 2015 13:34

Parkcomm wrote:Or possibly the disks are not idle - I assume you know how to use top and find:
Code: Select all
find /mnt/ -atime 1h -ls
will tell you which files were accessed in the last hour
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?find(1)
When I ran this I only got 4 permission denied returns for possible one mirror.
Code: Select all
top -m io -HSztja -o total
will tell you what processes are accessing I/O
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?top(1)

Little activity. Assuming I'm looking at read or write counts. Only had one or 2 from pid 19.
Can't heck much more at the moment. But thought I'd reply with what I found.

Post by **b0ssman** » 29 Oct 2015 13:48

if you have any activity then the drives wont spin down.

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 29 Oct 2015 19:56

Yeah I understand that. Trying to decide what's doing it. I switched all but extended webgui, ssh and dynamic dns off and still no luck.

Can I find out what the pids are?
Did i read somewhere that there was an issue with nas4free not allowing disks to spin down?

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 29 Oct 2015 20:51

Just tried ataidle -s but get an error

ataidle: error opening -s

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 29 Oct 2015 21:02

Erm. Having a look and fell on this. I think someone's already mentioned it. But maybe it's not a good idea?
http://wiki.nas4free.org/doku.php?id=warnings

Thoughts?

Parkcomm · Post by **Parkcomm** » 29 Oct 2015 23:01

fizzgig656 wrote: Little activity. Assuming I'm looking at read or write counts. Only had one or 2 from pid 19.
Can't heck much more at the moment. But thought I'd reply with what I found.

Just so you know how to use the tools - use top to tell you which process is doing reads or writes - but use find to locate the actual files. This is important because the process might be accessing your USB drive or pseudo devices like /dev/urandom or /dev/null/ etc. These will not affect spin down of your rotation drives.

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 30 Oct 2015 00:22

If I log in as root and just run

Code: Select all

find /mnt/ -atime 1h -ls

I get no output.

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ltbowers: ~# find /mnt/ -atime 1h -ls
ltbowers: ~#

Does that mean nothings accessing any file?

Should I really be thinking of spinning down zfs mirrored drives?

Once again thanks for telling me and explainging it (sometimes more useful....there's only so much go ogling you can do before the wife starts looking at me with the big frying pan

)

Parkcomm · Post by **Parkcomm** » 30 Oct 2015 02:37

Does that mean nothings accessing any file?

Pretty much - I'd check the power settings in the BIOS next.

Should I really be thinking of spinning down zfs mirrored drives?

Don't know - I am not familiar with the issue covered in the wiki. The reason I don't spin mine down is that it doesn't save much. Per Drive assuming an energy cost of 20c per KW:

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            Watts       KwH in a Year   $ per year (20c per KW)
Spun down -   0.5           4383                 1
Spun Up-      6.0          52596                11

So spinning down will save you $10 per drive per year - $40 for your system, if the drives are spun down 24/7. If they are spun up 6 hours per day then you only save $30.

For me not worth it - I have multiple users doing all sorts of stuff which would reduce the time spent spun down anyway.

For you the equation might be different.

spy0r · Post by **spy0r** » 30 Oct 2015 08:02

i wouldn't spin down a ZFS pool, too (same arguments as Parkcomm).

But a simple question: Did you enable SMART? I think if you poll the SMART values too often, that will prevent the drives from spindown, too. I had a setting like that with a backup disk in another system: SMART poll every 30minutes, Spindown after 20minutes - That worked.

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 30 Oct 2015 09:42

Fair enough. Your advice and judgment is taken very seriously. I think I'll leave them. If they drives are not in use like above, will they idle (guessing it's one step up from standby)
Do you guys use power levels at all?

Parkcomm · Post by **Parkcomm** » 30 Oct 2015 09:49

I always intend to use level 128, then I do something that need faster disk speed, so I step it up - but I'd say my disk are sitting on level 254 more often than not.

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 30 Oct 2015 10:05

Ok. So if you disable the setting. Making fully performance available. When not in use or even little will it reduce power?

Parkcomm · Post by **Parkcomm** » 30 Oct 2015 11:31

APM will reduce power used and slow down performance even if you do not spin down. Is that what you were asking?

fizzgig656 · Post by **fizzgig656** » 30 Oct 2015 13:27

Sort off. If I don't set APM, so leave it disabled will the drives idle on low ish power (as low as it can without spinning down) themselves? Does APM make more of an effect while the hdd is in use?

Parkcomm · Post by **Parkcomm** » 30 Oct 2015 13:34

APM definitely lowers power while the disk is in use - I do not know if the power usage is reduced during idle, probably.

XigmaNAS

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