WD20EARS drives not spinning down automatically


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I did some tests and it seems, it's Drive-related - sometimes the EARS spins down, sometimes it dont. I think i will change the Drive because its near 5 years old.

 

 

I specifically remember an old WD drive having a strange issue. Once I did the spin down manually, it started to do the automatic spin up/spin down behavior. Perhaps you could try.

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i always spinning down my drives manually because auto spin down is not working. And that manual spin down does not change that.

 

 

Just a smale info regarding the WD20EARS: I found out, that this problem (no spindown) only occures, if the default spindown is set to 15min.If it is set to 30min, the WD20EARS goes to sleep normal.Maybe this Info is helpfull for someone.

 

Is the spindown timer less then 30 minutes?

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Hi all and happy new 2015!

 

Just wanted to check in and report a very similar behaviour with the same model of drives WD20EARS on unRAID 6.0-beta12.

 

System: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. - H87M-PLUS

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-4770S CPU @ 3.10GHz

Cache: 256 kB, 1024 kB, 8192 kB

Memory: 8192 MB (max. 32 GB)

Network: eth0: 1000Mb/s - Full Duplex

Kernel: Linux 3.17.4-unRAID x86_64

 

Parity WDC_WD20EARX-00PASB0_WD-WCAZAJ839165 (sdb)

Disk 1 WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WCAZA4635215 (sdf)

Disk 2 WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WCAZA4635377 (sdg) - Frequently

Disk 3 WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WCAZA4578960 (sdh) - Occasionally

Disk 4 WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WCAZA4629088 (sdi) - Frequently

Disk 7 SAMSUNG_HD154UI_S1XWJD2ZB03874 (sdd)

Disk 8 SAMSUNG_HD154UI_S1XWJ1LZ400560 (sde)

Cache SanDisk_SDSSDXP240G_142517400522 (sdc)

 

I'm only running cache_dirs and Plex Media Server inside a docker container.

 

Running cache_dirs alone, with PMS turned off doesn't seem to trigger the problem.

 

With PMS on, drives stay off until I access a certain movie. After I finish watching, I can see in system log the Spin down commands for all spinning drives. They momentarily appear to go off but then they come back on and stay on indefinitely. Spinning them down manually - either individually or through the array spin down command - spins them down completely and keeps them off.

 

I tried changing from 15min to 30min but the same effect occurs. I use to think only a coupe of drives were affected (disk 2 and 4) but I'm noticing it now on drive 3 too. Never seen it on the Samsung drives though.

 

Hope this helps identify the root of the problem. Happy to run any kinds of tests if helps. My linux skills are not much more than a few basic shell commands.

 

Unfortunately for me getting back to v5 is no longer an option since I joined two physical machines into one and love the new Dockers.

 

Best,

Andy

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

EDIT: Found the Solution!!!

The Bad Boy who is causing this Problem (in my case) is the ASMedia 1061 SATA-III Chip on my ASRock B75 Pro3 M

It seems that the WD20EARS cant communicate propperly with this Chip.

I changed the connection of the EARS from the ASMedia to one of the OnBoard-SATA Ports and did some Test.

The Problem is solved!!! Amazing  ;)

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