I am running Unraid 7.2.3. I have been trying to identify the cause of my disks not spinning down.

A few weeks ago I thought I had a fix - it was to set the spindown delay on each disk in the array, rather than allow the default to trickle down. This worked - disks started spinning down after an hour of inactvity. I wrote a User Script to run (using hdparm to set to 242) after the array starts and thought it was solved (even though this seems to be a problem with Unraid not honouring the default).

In the last week I have noticed the disks are not spinning down again, after a couple of weeks of uptime - I need to run my script to set the spindown delay per disk and then they do.

Is there a known issue in Unraid with spindown that I can't find on the internet? Years ago (< v6) spindown was not a problem.

MORE THOUGHTS:

It's like there is a disconnect between the default spindown, the per disk spindown and the spindown set by hdparm).

What is the mechanism Unraid uses to determine when to spin down disks? Does it rely on its own "last use" time per disk then send a spindown command? (I assume this is the case - if so this could be why my hdparm set is being forgotten)

here is my script:

#!/bin/bash

HDPARM_VALUE=242

echo "Waiting for array to start..."

# Wait until disks.ini exists and is populated

while [ ! -s /var/local/emhttp/disks.ini ]; do

sleep 2

done

echo "Array is started."

echo "Applying spindown delay to parity and array disks..."

# Extract device= entries (sdX, nvmeXnY)

DEVS=$(grep -oP 'device="\K[^"]+' /var/local/emhttp/disks.ini | grep -v "flash")

for DEVNAME in $DEVS; do

DEV="/dev/$DEVNAME"

if [[ ! -b "$DEV" ]]; then

echo "Skipping $DEVNAME (no block device)"

continue

fi

hdparm -S "$HDPARM_VALUE" "$DEV" >/dev/null 2>&1

echo "Set spindown delay on $DEV"

done

echo "Done."

Edited February 24Feb 24 by topherino

9 hours ago, topherino said:

Is there a known issue in Unraid with spindown that I can't find on the internet?

Nope, only known issue is with zfs pools/disks, which will spin up once every 24H, but there's a fix.

Diagnostics may help see what the issue is.

Diagnostics attached

tower-diagnostics-20260226-2108.zip

Nothing jumps out to me regarding hardware or config, most likely something is accessing the disks, you could try set the wrong filesystem for one of the disks, that would make it unmountable, and then see if that specific disk still has the issue.