August 12, 201114 yr From the 5b10 thread, I was surprised to find many who don't sleep their servers. Now personally mine goes to sleep when all disks are shutdown and my Mac Pro, PS3 and TV are off. If nothing is using it then no point in having it on, kind of thing. Given WOL takes ~15 seconds to bring it back to life, the power savings outweigh the inconvenience, and besides, most of that time is waiting for disks to spin up, which you have even if you don't sleep your servers! So vote and then post saying why it doesn't sleep! Thanks Edit: Also say if it's a home or business environment.
August 12, 201114 yr No, I never put my unRAID to sleep. My unit is the 'house server'. As such, I never know if it will be used or not, at any time of the day. Users are accessing this unit at any time, plus there are other automatic services that are running at all hours of the day from other server/user machines. Individual drives do spin down, and there is a small wait for them to spin-up, but the server itself is almost always being accessed, or will be shortly. Bruce
August 12, 201114 yr Author No, I never put my unRAID to sleep. My unit is the 'house server'. As such, I never know if it will be used or not, at any time of the day. Users are accessing this unit at any time, plus there are other automatic services that are running at all hours of the day from other server/user machines. Individual drives do spin down, and there is a small wait for them to spin-up, but the server itself is almost always being accessed, or will be shortly. Bruce So what services does the server offer during times that all the people are asleep, say 1AM to 6AM?
August 12, 201114 yr So what services does the server offer during times that all the people are asleep, say 1AM to 6AM? For me (and I suspect many others) : - offsite backups system tasks you don't want running whilst you're trying to watch a film like : - parity checks - cache drive migrations - backup filesystem scans And more generic wishy washy things like : - virtual machines that are doing their own things outside this unraid specific list - infrastructure network services that could be used by any client in the house at any time day or night I'm sure others will add to create a much much longer list. I find it more surprising anyone sleeps their server. I get so much use out of mine at the household level that it being unavailable is a major pain (yes I have to schedule downtime..)
August 12, 201114 yr Given WOL takes ~15 seconds to bring it back to life, the power savings outweigh the inconvenience, and besides, most of that time is waiting for disks to spin up, which you have even if you don't sleep your servers! Just out of curiosity, how much of a power saving are you getting? I've been meaning to do some calculations myself, whenever I could remember to borrow a power meter from a friend.
August 12, 201114 yr Nope, Mine is always on. Drives sleep, but my machine doesn't. I do some file encoding at night on my PC and of course it stores them on my unRAID machine. Weekends I backup myweb site automatically.
August 12, 201114 yr My server never sleeps, but my drives do spin down via the default 1 hour spindown timer. I seed torrents from my server, so generally half or so of my drives will be spun up at any given time.
August 12, 201114 yr No, I never put my unRAID to sleep. My unit is the 'house server'. As such, I never know if it will be used or not, at any time of the day. Users are accessing this unit at any time, plus there are other automatic services that are running at all hours of the day from other server/user machines. Individual drives do spin down, and there is a small wait for them to spin-up, but the server itself is almost always being accessed, or will be shortly. Bruce So what services does the server offer during times that all the people are asleep, say 1AM to 6AM? Well, that's a good question. Cache drive moves Nightly backups of all client computers Transcoding Handbrake files (right now as a file server, but looking to move the trans-coding directly on to the unRAID server) Receiving Off-air TV recordings (file serving) And still yet, general file serving (I keep late hours and don't sleep much) All this does or at least can happen between 1AM and 6 AM. And the list grows as I figure out more to push to the server. Bruce
August 13, 201114 yr Author Given WOL takes ~15 seconds to bring it back to life, the power savings outweigh the inconvenience, and besides, most of that time is waiting for disks to spin up, which you have even if you don't sleep your servers! Just out of curiosity, how much of a power saving are you getting? I've been meaning to do some calculations myself, whenever I could remember to borrow a power meter from a friend. Idle idle my server is ~40W with all drives shut down. Then ~75W with them all spinning and ~100W when parity checking. So given it's shutdown for 50% of the day, and sometimes not run for 48 hours straight it's quite a kew KWh overtime. Edit: I see what you are all doing, as my usage is only when people are awake then sleeping the system is important for me!
August 13, 201114 yr At 40 Watts, if your system is off 50% of the time, you are saving only about $20 a year. With frequency scaling and undervolting, my at rest unRAID box pulls about 33 Watts. I have collapsed multiple functions into unRAID, including: home security monitoring environmental monitoring offsite backups transcoding call logging VOIP gateway Once you have a need for one "always on" box, it makes sense to use unRAID for it.
August 13, 201114 yr I have two servers. One runs 24/7 and runs at 30W with the cache drive spinning, torrents uploading and usenet downloading. It doesn't even have an S3 mode, so it's never off. With all the drives spun down, including the cache, it uses 27W. The other server is off 99% of the time. It just contains my movie collection and is only switched on when there's something I want to watch that's not on the small, low power server.
August 13, 201114 yr I have S3 and WOL working perfect When all disc are Spun down, my server go to sleep when no media player or PC are on-line. Runing WOL command during tvix is booting, and also from android phone or PC/Hackintosh. Its perfect, I'm using the server for movie, music and DL from usenet. To get server to sleep when nobody aren't using it, is for me obviously! BR Peter
August 18, 201114 yr Mine stays on 24/7 and All drives are spun up. Usually stays around 120-130w 24/7
August 19, 201114 yr I voted yes as that's how i want the server to behave, but haven't got around to actually getting it set up - is there a 'best method'? i've played around a bit before but stopped when i kept getting red balls of doom next to certain drives, since i've stopped using sleep they've been fine! also noticed that if i send the server a wol when its powered down, it turns on, no idea how i managed to set that up!
August 19, 201114 yr No. I leave my Main Unraid box on 24x7. I run backups to it starting at about midnight. then at 4AM the mover kicks off and that is usually pretty full. Now my other servers do sleep. All 3 of my Windows storage servers with RAID arrays all auto sleep after two hours of inactivity. They come alive as soon as try and connect to them. My second unRAID box actually gets powered down. it gets turned on once every 2 weeks to backup my main unRAID box. It then go goes back off.
August 22, 201114 yr Author No. I leave my Main Unraid box on 24x7. I run backups to it starting at about midnight. then at 4AM the mover kicks off and that is usually pretty full. Now my other servers do sleep. All 3 of my Windows storage servers with RAID arrays all auto sleep after two hours of inactivity. They come alive as soon as try and connect to them. My second unRAID box actually gets powered down. it gets turned on once every 2 weeks to backup my main unRAID box. It then go goes back off. Given your server is currently upwards of what seems to be 30TB, I assume your server is in a serious production environment and not a home one? Even if I was bringing home 30GB of RAW photos a day it would take 3 solid years to get to 30TB!!! Maybe I should have rephrased my poll. Who uses there servers at home for a non-business based task and doesn't sleep it!
August 23, 201114 yr No. I leave my Main Unraid box on 24x7. I run backups to it starting at about midnight. then at 4AM the mover kicks off and that is usually pretty full. Now my other servers do sleep. All 3 of my Windows storage servers with RAID arrays all auto sleep after two hours of inactivity. They come alive as soon as try and connect to them. My second unRAID box actually gets powered down. it gets turned on once every 2 weeks to backup my main unRAID box. It then go goes back off. Given your server is currently upwards of what seems to be 30TB, I assume your server is in a serious production environment and not a home one? Even if I was bringing home 30GB of RAW photos a day it would take 3 solid years to get to 30TB!!! Maybe I should have rephrased my poll. Who uses there servers at home for a non-business based task and doesn't sleep it! I have a 40TB server 65-75% full well actually I've split that into 2 servers now because I don't like to get over 66% full as it only takes 3-6 months to fill that space with HD recordings from my 2 HD-PVRs and 1 Colossus.
August 23, 201114 yr Author LoL.. no. this is home use I am what microsoft termed, "a digital horder" What do you horde? I backup every Blu-ray I buy and have two 18MP D-SLRs and even 10TB is a year off at least! Ridiculous amounts of data!
August 24, 201114 yr Both my server's stay on 24/7 and drives never spin down. All home use, Music, TV and Movies. First server is at 95% capacity of 40TB, second server is 6TB of 9TB full already, never ends
August 24, 201114 yr I voted "NO" because that is the truth, but I would like to get my srever to sleep, I just haven't put in the effort to make it do so. So in that respect, my vote would be "Yes" because I want it to sleep.
August 24, 201114 yr My server stays on 24/7 but the drives all spin down. Apart from serving music and videos to players around the house, it also runs my mailfetcher and local mailserver. A significant reason for not sleeping is that it would require a wake on power-fail in order to perform a clean shutdown during a power outage. Although this ought to be feasible, it's not something that I feel is important because the server does need to be available for at least 18 hours a day.
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