Just need to know whether a disk will spin up from rest when a user share is queried?

If the contents aren't already cached in RAM, then yes, it will spin up the drive. There will be a delay as the drive is spun up, which may cause timing issues for the client, depending on what is happening. If your movies share spans several drives, and one of your DVD rips is spread across multiple drives, when the player tries to read a vob file from a spun down disk, there will be a pause in the movie while the drive is spun up. This, among other things, is why the concept of split level was implemented.

Thats good to hear. I'm storing my movie backups on 'paired' drives to my movies and didnt want disks which have had all of the contents watched staying spun down for days on end. Better to know that all disks will spin up at least once a day if i'm viewing daily. No idle discs is good news. I use split level of 2 with a 100GB min space so that side should be sorted.

 

I think you misunderstood this.  A drive only spins up if it's needed.

 

Disks that aren't being accessed are NOT spun up ... so you could easily have some disks that don't spin up for days (or even weeks).    That's not necessarily bad ... but if you want to be sure all your disks are spun up when you're using the array, you can enable "Spin Up Groups"  (on the disk settings page).    Then you can simply add all of your disks to the same spin-up group => this will cause all of the disks in the group to spin up whenever one is accessed.

 

I think you misunderstood this.  A drive only spins up if it's needed.

 

Disks that aren't being accessed are NOT spun up ... so you could easily have some disks that don't spin up for days (or even weeks).    That's not necessarily bad ... but if you want to be sure all your disks are spun up when you're using the array, you can enable "Spin Up Groups"  (on the disk settings page).    Then you can simply add all of your disks to the same spin-up group => this will cause all of the disks in the group to spin up whenever one is accessed.

 

But .... doesn't the drive spin up all spanned disks if I access (refresh) the 'movies' share?

 

I reckon that to select a suitable movie for watching WILL spin up all disks a least to show a list of what's available, yes?

 

I'm only interested in knowing that ALL disks spin up for at least 15mins each day, keeps them exercised. I appreciate that once my selection is made then that disk is 'spun' and other disks will eventually spin down dependant on settings, in my case 15mins. Correct or not?

What do you exactly mean by "select a suitable movie"? If using Plex or XBMC then you are just choosing from the database and not from the drives.

 

The whole point of split level is to keep all parts of a given movie, etc on the same drive so all the others in the movie share don't have to spin up and you don't have to wait for spinup in the middle of the movie because all of that movie is on one disk.

What do you exactly mean by "select a suitable movie"? If using Plex or XBMC then you are just choosing from the database and not from the drives.

 

The whole point of split level is to keep all parts of a given movie, etc on the same drive so all the others in the movie share don't have to spin up and you don't have to wait for spinup in the middle of the movie because all of that movie is on one disk.

 

Will be using MB3 eventually .... split levels i'm ok with BUT when i choose a movie I want ALL disks for the movie/backup shares to spinup with the one sourcing the movie staying up and the others spinning down after 15mins. I've just read the FAQ on spinup groups and i reckon that should do the trick. I'm only hosting a media server, no xbmc or plex plugins and thge reason for wanting ALL discs exercised each time i select a movie via MB3 is that i will then know that its 'partner' disk containing the backup will also have been spun up for a minimal time. Peace of mind I suppose. Otherwise it's possible for a backup disk to sit there idle for a considerable time without being accessed at all until the time comes when i need a backup and for some reason it's not accessible. Makes sense to me .... but then, that's me

I don't think spinup groups will do what you want. I believe a spinup group will spin the group up and down together. If a disk is not being used but is in the spinup group of a disk that is being used then it will also spin. The reason for spinup groups is so you won't get a spinup delay when accessing any of those disks.

a example of spinup groups is you have movies on disk1 thru 5 and tv shows on 6 thru 10

 

If you group them 1-5 and 6-10, if you access movies 1-5 will spin up and stay spun up as long as movies are being accessed etc

 

Myk

 

So ... spinup groupings will override any spin down timing settings? If so, thats no use to me.

Spinup groups will not do what you want -- as noted, the entire group will stay spun up as long as you're using any disk within that group.

 

Accessing a directory of your share MAY cause all the disks to spin up ... it depends on exactly what directories are currently in the directory cache.    In fact, many folks use CacheDirs to AVOID exactly what you want to happen -- CacheDirs does its best to ensure the directories are always in the cache, so NO disks need to spin up to access a directory list (i.e. a list of your movies) ... and thus ONLY the disk you're actually going to watch a movie from will spin up.

 

I can't think of any reason to do what you're trying to achieve here ... but if you want to do it, you could write a Cron task that executes once/day and does a "SpinUp" command, which will spin up all drives.  I'm not sure what the command line is to execute that command, but I suspect someone who does will chime in      That would spin up all of your drives at the scheduled time;  and any that weren't in use would then spin back down after your spindown timer expired (e.g. in 15 minutes).

 

That sounds good but i'm u/s at any form of coding .... anyone?