July 9, 201411 yr I have a question for anyone that may have experience with Dell Servers. I have three 2950 Dual X5470's, 24GB RAM and 6 2TB HDD's. They had PERC 6/i Raid cards in them with Raid 6 configured, when a friend introduced me to UnRaid (which I have since fell in love with). I changed out the Raid card for a PERC 6 SAS card without raid capability. I did it mainly to reduce the need to assign a Raid0 to each drive in order to get them to appear. Now they're just handed over. My question revolves around the spin down feature. Does that card actually allow UnRaid to spin the physical disk down completely and how can I tell? Aside from sitting next to the rack and listening for it to spin down, is there another way? Would Unraid's UI tell me if they didn't actually spin down or is it just relying on what the SAS card responds with? Some insight would be helpful and I appreciate any responses. I just want to make sure the disks are actually spinning down and the card isn't just blowing off the OS and leaving them running.
July 9, 201411 yr Welcome to the unRAID forums. Do you mean the PERC 6/i? I don't know if this card works with unRAID? Do you have it running? Looks like a h/w raid adapter and I'm not sure if you can "just" pass through the drives. I have the PERC H310 flashed to IT mode and the spin-down works fine. Here is a list of HBA know to work with unRAID.
July 10, 201411 yr Author Welcome to the unRAID forums. Do you mean the PERC 6/i? I don't know if this card works with unRAID? Do you have it running? Looks like a h/w raid adapter and I'm not sure if you can "just" pass through the drives. I have the PERC H310 flashed to IT mode and the spin-down works fine. Here is a list of HBA know to work with unRAID. Thank you! I have ben through FreeNAS, NAS4Free, OMV, and a couple other NAS solutions for hard storage and finally just had Windows 2012 do all the work. When my friend let me tinker a bit with his UnRaid, I was excited to get home and test it on the standby server. So far, it's been wonderful. I actually have three cards available that I've used and got working (kind of). The PERC6/i Raid, Perc5/i Raid & finally a version of the PERC 6 that is simply a dumbed down controller for the backplane called the PERC6 SAS card (Part # E2K-UCS-61-(B), look it up). It's basically just a controller without any smart stuff; just hands over the HDD's like a normal SATA operation would. Indeed, it does work best to just use the SAS card without the raid layer, but I was having trouble telling if UnRaid was actually being successful in spinning down the drives or if the card would say it was, but continue managing the disks power management on its own. The lights on the front of the 2950 remain the same and the rack is too load to hear if the disks are spinning or not (I even tried the stick method mechanics use when looking for bearing squeaks.. I looked like a real red neck. ha). In the end it was to no avail, so I wasn't sure if there was a command I could run that would force a hardware report in shell... Next step is to just run a voltammeter on the machines power to see what wattage it's pulling and if it kicks down after Unraid reports spindowns. Meh.. -Colter *Edit: Grammar.
July 10, 201411 yr What about the spin-down button on the unRAID GUI? I suppose if you issue that command you should be able to see/hear what is going down since all drives should stop spinning. If you can trigger that by the GUI I expect unRAID will be able to do it also. Edit: The only bad with this cards (5/i, 6/i) is that they do not support drives >2.2TB capacity. http://www.overclock.net/t/359025/perc-5-i-raid-card-tips-and-benchmarks
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