I just built a new 5 disk server and specified the spindown for all drives at 2 hours.

 

It appears the drives spin down  successfully ( as shown by the flashing green dots in the web interface) but I hear the drives spinning up every few minutes. However, when i check the web interface, the drives show the flashing green dots indicating the drives are still spun down.

 

So i checked my syslog and found the following:

 

Mar 20 21:30:59 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (89): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:31:00 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (90): spindown 1
Mar 20 21:31:00 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (91): spindown 2
Mar 20 21:31:01 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (92): spindown 3
Mar 20 21:31:03 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (93): spindown 4
Mar 20 21:35:44 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)
Mar 20 21:35:54 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (94): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:37:55 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)
Mar 20 21:38:05 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (95): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:40:06 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)
Mar 20 21:40:16 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (96): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:42:17 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)
Mar 20 21:42:27 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (97): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:44:28 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)
Mar 20 21:44:38 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (98): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:46:39 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)
Mar 20 21:46:49 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (99): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:48:50 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)
Mar 20 21:49:00 MediaServer00 kernel: mdcmd (100): spindown 0
Mar 20 21:51:01 MediaServer00 kernel: ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)

 

I've [posted only a fragment of the entire log as the "lost interrupt" messages go on and on.

 

Can someone explain what is going on here?

 

I fear the drives attempting to start up like this over and over will shorten their life.

 

 

Please post entire syslog. zip if required. Need to determine the details of ata1.

Here it is.

 

Entire syslog attached.

 

Thanks!

SpinDown_Syslog.txt

Please post full system specs.

If your drives are constantly trying to spin down it could be an indication that some process is forcing them to wake up without informing unRAID.  This happened to me with a cron jobbed fan script that was checking SMART status on hard drives every 2 minutes.  After the drives were ordered to sleep, they kept being woken up by the cron job to check their status, and then unRAID came in and forced them asleep again.

The issue turned out to be a bad drive. I replaced the drive and the error messages went away.