Do you use spin up groups?


jonp

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3 minutes ago, knightrider15 said:

i just personally don't see why features should be removed

I use spin up groups, but this issue was raised to see if anybody still used it.

 

If a feature has outlived its purpose, and nobody uses it, then continuing to support a feature that no one wants is a foolish use of time that could be put towards stuff people do want. I'm all for pruning useless code, it makes it easier to support the functions that people actually use.

 

This particular feature is staying put for the time being.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I suspect that most newer controllers don't have the issue that this resolves; but for those of us who still have older systems it's a very useful feature to eliminate any "stutter" in media playback caused by another drive spinning up on the same controller as the one we're streaming from.

 

It's easy enough to avoid that -- either spin all drives up when streaming media;  or don't use the array for anything else when you're streaming ... and the issue this resolves won't ever happen.    But unless there's a good reason to eliminate the feature, I'd prefer to see it retained.

 

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I use Spin up groups with all three of my unRAID setups.

Since I mainly use external port multiplier housings for all my drives, they will all spin down in the enclosure. No need for the drive to be spinning unless I've reading from it or writing to it. Otherwise it's just producing needless heat and needlessly using power. I'm using fifty seven drives between my three unRAID setups.

 

53TB unRAID2--45TB unRAID3--35TB unRAID1a

Edited by aaronwt
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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...

I used to use the spin up groups but then got annoyed with the fact that when I wanted to access data on the main array it would take some time for it to spin up the drives.

 

I would rather have the drives on all the time and not spin down after sometime as that way I don't loose performance.

 

Not to mention as I use Plex I don't want people waiting for the disk to spin up, search for the file and then play.

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My 2 9211-8i controllers suffer from the problem of a lag when another drive on the same controller spins up. This causes issues when we're watching one movie, but another process spins up a different drive on the same controller.

 

Any suggestions for a controller that won't exhibit this problem so I can stop using spin-up groups?

Edited by NNate
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On 1/14/2019 at 10:22 AM, NNate said:

My 2 9211-8i controllers suffer from the problem of a lag when another drive on the same controller spins up. This causes issues when we're watching one movie, but another process spins up a different drive on the same controller.

 

Any suggestions for a controller that won't exhibit this problem so I can stop using spin-up groups?

Are you using Plex?  Most clients will download X amount of time ahead to account for potential unstable connection.  For Plex I also set my transcoding to throttle at 5 minutes so enough of it is in the buffer just in case.  I have a similar controller but 4 ports and have never seen an issue.  I let all my drives spin down after inactivity and only spin up as needed.

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I've currently got 20 data drives connected to a SuperMicro BPN-SAS2-846EL SAS2 expander backplane, which is connected to 4 SAS ports on my Supermicro X10SL7-F Motherboard.  Parity & cache drive connected internally to mobo SATA ports.

 

I don't use spinup groups, but searching for spinup freezing got me here.  I've dabbled with running a user script across the evenings to spin up all drives between - say - 7 and 11pm.  This prevents freezing, but I'd rather not have all drives on without reason.

 

How do you go about identifying if/how drives are grouped?  Is it a case of setting off some activity and spinning up each drive one by one and checking for pausing, or is there a more logical approach?  Or am I being stupid and a SAS expander would have them all grouped regardless?

 

It only takes one person to spend most evenings tinkering with files and another starting a few things to decide what to watch, and the main media player can be chopped to bits.

 

I'd certainly use spin-up groups if I could identify if/how the drives grouped.  Unless there is a better way now.

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9 minutes ago, Cessquill said:

How do you go about identifying if/how drives are grouped?

Settings - Disk Settings, Use Spin Up Groups

 

Then each individual drive from main, give it a named group (like "Movies", "TV", etc)

11 minutes ago, Cessquill said:

I don't use spinup groups, but searching for spinup freezing got me here.  I've dabbled with running a user script across the evenings to spin up all drives between - say - 7 and 11pm.  This prevents freezing, but I'd rather not have all drives on without reason.

Best solution is to increase the caching on the player(s).  Kodi you can easily do this.  Not sure about plex

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1 minute ago, Squid said:

Settings - Disk Settings, Use Spin Up Groups

 

Then each individual drive from main, give it a named group (like "Movies", "TV", etc)

Sorry, I meant from a hardware controller perspective - eg, if disk4 spins up, disk1 will freeze but disk12 will not.

 

Thanks for the cache tip - I will do that, but in addition would like to solve/patch at source if poss.

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2 minutes ago, Cessquill said:

I will do that, but in addition would like to solve/patch at source if poss.

You won't.  It's the hardware causing it.  It's pausing all I/O on other drives connected to the same controller waiting for the drive to spin up.  Extremely common issue, and zip you can do about it.

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1 minute ago, Squid said:

You won't.  It's the hardware causing it.  It's pausing all I/O on other drives connected to the same controller waiting for the drive to spin up.  Extremely common issue, and zip you can do about it.

Ahh, OK, I was under the hope/impression from reading here that my drives might be h/w grouped within the system.  If the spin up of any one drive forces the system to freeze activity for all other drives then spinup groups aren't going to help me here.

 

Thanks for the advice.

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