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Sick of spinning up disks; should I set it on cron or just shut it off?

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It's minor but the delay causes errors in some programs. How much does it affect disk life to have them always on? What about power consumption? Is it possible to have cron spin them down at night and then wake them up in the morning or should I just never spin down?

spin up groups doesn't solve it? or is it not a problem of multiple drives, and rather a problem with infrequent access? So when access does occasionally occur, there's a delay? 

How about using the Cache script to preload directories? that would buy you a few seconds.

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In frequent use, when we do use it there is a delay and/or a timeout on the client (I know, clients fault). We have our movie collection on there and we see this with plex. If we start a movie while it's been idle it usually fails the first time. Friends who share our server complain of this too.

I have a cron.hourly job to keep certain disks active for certain hours of the day via /etc/cron.hourly.

 

 

root@unRAID:/etc/cron.hourly# more keepspin.sh 
#!/bin/bash

P=${0##*/}
R=${0%%$P}
P=${P%.*}

coproc /usr/bin/logger -t${P}[$$] -plocal0.debug

exec 1>&${COPROC[1]} 2>&1
# exec 2>&${COPROC[1]}

while read FILE AFTER BEFORE
do  [ -z "${FILE%\#*}" ] && continue
    [ ! -z "${AFTER}"  ] && AFTER="-a ${AFTER}"
    [ ! -z "${BEFORE}" ] && BEFORE="-b ${BEFORE}"
    /boot/local/bin/istime ${AFTER} ${BEFORE} && ( date > ${FILE} ; rm ${FILE} )
done <<-EOF
/mnt/disk1/.istime 08:00 23:00
/mnt/disk3/.istime 08:00 23:00
EOF

 

I use my istime program to check if I'm running between certain hours, This could certainly be changed to be lines in cron to touch a file in the root directory of each disk you want to keep active.

 

My spindown timer is set for 2 hours.

 

The only reason I did it this was was to avoid resubmitting cron everytime I booted up.

I may change this.

since my cron now has these additional entries. (for ideas if interested).

00 00 27 * * /root/mdcmd check 
00 08 * * * /root/mdcmd set md_write_method 1
00 00 * * * /root/mdcmd set md_write_method 0

 

This is some other issue I'd say...network related maybe. Or you have really slow disks. All my disks spin down, and watching a moving in plex  from a spun down disk is like a 4 second "please wait" kind of deal. I have NEVER seen a time out due to disk spin up.

Remotely or using plexbmc I frequently got things failing to play due to disk spin ups.  Spin-up groups mostly solved this for me but I still get occasional timeouts using the plex web client.

 

This never happens using the native plex client.

Perhaps you are constrained by processor horsepower or memory...

 

Describe your unRAID server...processor, Motherboard and RAM...

And what plug-ins are you running?

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