Spin-up behavior - is this normal?

[Smitty2k1]

Hi all - long time unRaid user here. I mostly use my unRaid as a basic file server. It has always bugged me that there are times that when drives spin up all activity seems to stop on the server. It is most notable during two instances - playing music in Foobar2000 on a client PC and loading Kodi/Emby on a client PC.

 

If I have music playing in Foobar2000 and a drive spins up (presumably a DIFFERENT drive than what the music is on, as the music is already playing), for some reason all music in Foobar2000 stops for several seconds until the drive(s) spin up. 

 

When I load Kodi (with the Emby plugin) the entire system basically hangs until drives spin up. I would have assumed drives wouldn't need to spin up until I select a  media file to play, but at least one drive seems to spin up once I open Kodi on the client. Maybe because it is checking for new media? 

 

I've tried the Cache Dir plugin, which sort of helps when browsing files through file explorer (sometimes) but doesn't really seem to help with these other instances. This issue has been going on for numerous versions of unRaid. I've had many hardware swaps over the years but the "array" has never changed (i.e. I never started over from scratch). 

 

Pretty basic server config, see screenshot. For dockers I run Deluge, Emby, and Logitech Media Server. No VMs. Just wondering if this is normal/expected behavior or if there are any tweaks I can try to prevent this.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Smitty2k1

[ChatNoir]

Difficult to say without more information. The diagnostics and more information on the shares that cause the issue would be a good place to start.

 

In general, disks should not be spinned up randomly unless a program on your NAS or on the network tries to access something on that drive.

[Smitty2k1]

22 hours ago, ChatNoir said:

Difficult to say without more information. The diagnostics and more information on the shares that cause the issue would be a good place to start.

 

In general, disks should not be spinned up randomly unless a program on your NAS or on the network tries to access something on that drive.

 

Thanks - the issue isn't why is a different disk spinning up - it's why when a different disk spins up it causes playback/browsing of the other disk to pause.

 

For example, my music is stored on disk 1 and it's spun up because I'm listening to music on a client device. If someone in my family accesses movies on disk 2 then disk 2 spins up. But when disk 2 spins up the playback of my music on disk 1 pauses/hangs until disk 2 is spun up. Is that normal expected behavior?

[ChatNoir]

3 minutes ago, Smitty2k1 said:

Is that normal expected behavior?

 

Not unless there are serious bottleneck in your system.

[Smitty2k1]

20 minutes ago, ChatNoir said:

 

Not unless there are serious bottleneck in your system.

 

Just happened a few minutes ago and the only relevant item from the log seems to be reading SMART data:

 

Feb 24 10:01:39 Tower emhttpd: read SMART /dev/sdf
Feb 24 10:02:03 Tower emhttpd: read SMART /dev/sdd
Feb 24 10:02:20 Tower webGUI: Successful login user root from 192.168.1.19
Feb 24 10:02:43 Tower emhttpd: read SMART /dev/sdg
Feb 24 10:04:49 Tower emhttpd: cmd: /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/dynamix/scripts/tail_log syslog 
Feb 24 10:17:34 Tower emhttpd: spinning down /dev/sdd

tower-diagnostics-20220224-1024.zip

Edited February 24, 2022 by Smitty2k1