I have a 5 bay NAS and utilise 4 drives in Raid 5. That are plugged in to slots 1 - 4. The third drive is getting a bit warm as it’s sat between the second drive and the fourth(parity) drive. I’ve increased case fan speed but I would like to make it a bit cooler

 

is it possible to move the parity drive to the 5th slot without upsetting Unraid ? That way I would have a gap between the drives. Would Unraid even care ?

 

Edited May 24, 20242 yr by 1topgazza

are you sure you know what you really have???

There is no Parity Drive within RAID5 and there is no RAID5 within an UNRAID array...

 

In case you are talking about a real UNRAID array (x data drives + 1 parity), yes, you can move the drives freely. If a special sata controller is used for the enclosure, you have to limit the move within this enclosure. But normally you can move them anywhere because UNRAID recocgnizes them by their serial number (some SATA controllers fake / hide the number to the host, this gives stress then)

 

Yes, sorry, calling it raid 5 is just a force of habit 🤣

 

I’m new to Unraid after years of Qnap and recently SHR and Traid. One of the features I’m loving about Unraid is the refreshing, to me, way of managing resources and drives

 

I’ll move the drive and hopefully it will knock a couple of degrees off. It’s not excessive to be fair at 41 degrees but there’s no data on it and it’s clearly not getting enough ventilation as the other drives are mid 30s

 

Interestingly enough the two Toshiba N300 8TB drives are low to mid 30s but the two WD Red’s are at 37 which is the Parity drive and the afore mentioned 41  degrees. Nature of the beast I guess but I’ll give it a go and see what happens

Edited May 24, 20242 yr by 1topgazza

Different Drives, different Temperatures. Thats normal.

I would not be alarmed at 41° now. But when summer comes and it gets hotter, there maybe a problem.

See if you cannot let the disks sleep. Saves a lot of power and temps too.

You can configure spindown and the spindown delay for every disk (or set the default for all drives)

 

BTW my Toshiba's also are a lot cooler than the WD drives...

 

Thanks for that, great info. I’ll explore the sleep function. That will be useful. I’ve fitted Noctua fans which of course are excellent. Only 15mm due to space but they do a decent job. Of course if the ambient temp is warm ……

 

thanks again

Just another info that may help: Especially Disks designed for NAS (like WD-Red) need a certain temperature to work. If its too cool they slow down. Some of them even heat up before they start to work. Of course this is energy wasting if you cool them down and they try to work against it.

Read the Datasheets carefully for the drives to find the sweet spot for the working temperature.

 

Will do, good point

 

im assuming power down and repower is done in the motherboard as usual so I’ll check

 

but I’ll explore the setting in Unraid first for sleep/wakeup

Edited May 25, 20242 yr by 1topgazza

1 minute ago, 1topgazza said:

im assuming power down and repower is done in the motherboard as usual so I’ll check

 

you want to take down the whole server? thats not really desireable unless you know a way to wake him up again. What I had in mind is to let only the drives sleep.

Like

This can be easily achieved by editing the disk settings in UNRAID:

(note: you can select different timeouts for every disk too, but in general, set it here and set the drives to "use default"

 

You can see the actions in the logfile with entries like:

May 25 08:00:03 F emhttpd: read SMART /dev/sde
May 25 08:00:03 F emhttpd: read SMART /dev/sdc
May 25 08:00:26 F emhttpd: read SMART /dev/sdg
May 25 08:34:09 F emhttpd: spinning down /dev/sdc
May 25 09:05:34 F emhttpd: spinning down /dev/sdg
May 25 09:05:34 F emhttpd: spinning down /dev/sde

(You can also define "spindown groups", all drives within a group will be woken up again at the same time. This is sometimes desireable if share are scatter throughout many drives and you dont want to wait for spinup one by one)

 

Brilliant

 

i was only considering the two options. Complete shutdown or disk sleep. I agree though, complete shutdown is not a sensible option really

 

Spindown is fine

 

much appreciated

Ok

 

Just tried this and all drives went into standby. Opened Plex and played a movie and disk 1 fired up and movie played fine. Excellent. Just working out how to set all drives at the same time

 

I assume on 30 mins as I set delay for, it will spin down again ?

 

It then spins up on demand ? 
 

I’m liking Unraid even more

 

 

Just to add to my comment above in case anyone else reads this for help

 

I've set all times for spin down on each disk to 30 mins (rather than default - although thats as valid)

I've enabled groups

And called the group on each drive  as "1 2 3 4"

 

Hope thats correct

10 minutes ago, 1topgazza said:

I've set all times for spin down on each disk to 30 mins (rather than default - although thats as valid)

I've enabled groups

And called the group on each drive  as "1 2 3 4"

 

10 minutes ago, 1topgazza said:

Hope thats correct

Almost 😉

Its suffient to set the default to 30min and not on every disk (though it does not make any difference, as long as you do not want a disk to run longer or shorter than the others).

Group enabling is fine.

But there should only be ONE group (like "1" or so). All drives within the same group wake up at the same time.

Note that grouping has no influence on spindown time, it only controls spinup.

Usuall you do not need any groups now. They come in handy once you added drives later or replaced a drive (and enlarged it). From a certain fill level on UNRAID will split shares on many drives (this is done totally simple, a "share" is just a top level folder and if the two foldernames on two disks are identical (like "/movies") UNRAID joins the folders internally and shows them to the clients under the single name "/movies". Then it may become disturbend if you play a movie and it spins up a disk and then play the next and you need to wait again because this one was located on another disk. The user cannot see or know this, so it becomes a bit annoying.

For these purposes you create a "spinup group", so that all drives with the "/movie" folder wake up at the same time.

 

Ah, now I fully understand 😀

 

That makes total sense in grouping drives. I think I was overthinking it. I'll rename the group as /movies on each drive affected. Just for the exercise but I can see how no groups would be required in "normal" circumstances My learning curve is steep but I'm glad to see this community is so active and helpful.

 

I cant thank you enough

15 minutes ago, MAM59 said:

But there should only be ONE group

oops, I was a bit wrong here. Of course you can have MANY groups, but they only make sense if files on the disks within a group belong to each other somehow.

But its hard to find a practical example for this.

 

Maybe an array with 3 drives , "1" contains "movies", "2" contains "tvshows" and "3" was added after 1&2 were almost full. It contains "movies" AND "tvshows". Here you could create 2 spinup groups one with drives 1 & 3, the other with drives 2 & 3. If a user accesses a file on 1, 1 & 3 wake up, if on 2, 2 & 3 wake up.

But, what happens if the file is on 3

Yeah, then ALL wake up (which renders the grouping a bit useless again...)

So you see, spinup groups are usually not needed. Especially after your box runs for some years.

(Others may have different approaches for this)

That makes total sense

 

I don't mind experimenting. So I could put in the groups text " /movie /tvshows /other media" with a space between each, which covers the 3 folders I have But as you say I could equally just disable groups as the spin down/up. 

 

For instance at the moment I have 4 x 8TB drives. I only have 5TB data. Approx 4 TB (50% full) on disk 1 and a less than 1TB on disk two. So most of my media is on 1 with some over spill on 2.