I'm running Unraid purely as a plex server at the moment, using a optiplex MFF so more SATA hard drives were a no go. 

I'm currently using a MAIWO-K35272U3S 2 bay USB hard drive dock, but it has a 3 minute sleep function. Every time the dock/Unraid forces the drives to sleep, it messes my Plex library up and won't wake up the drives on use. Resulting in me having to turn the enclosure off and back on +  stop and start the array to remount drives. 

 

Currently I've attempted to use a custom script to "emulate" drive usage every 2 minutes. I thought it was working but I've come back today to the same issue 

 

I've done the scripts as below for disk 2 and 3 (the enclosure) script timings are 

 

*/2  * * * *

 

Quote

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
        date +%s > /mnt/disk2/keepalive_linux.txt
        sync
        sleep 2
done

 

I've also gone into hdparm and attempted to turn off any power saving features of the actual disks as below; but think this is still a firmware issue with the enclosure. 

 

hdparm -S 0 /dev/sde

 

hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdf

 

hdparm -Z /dev/sde

 

hdparm -Z /dev/sdf

 

Any ideas on the above and whether my first script should even be working? 

 

Can't lie, I'm a noob to unraid and my Linux days were long ago, so I'm pretty much in the dark haha. 

Edited November 20, 20241 yr by Darkzy43

USB not recommended for assigned disks for many reasons besides this problem

What kind of problems? very vague reply. appreciate it

They are prone to dropping offline, and USB is bad at error handling n general, having said that, some users do use them without major issues, some USB bridges are better than others, but if possible we recommend avoiding USB fro array and pools.