[solved] Parity and Disk 1 never spin down

[bigjme]

Hi Everyone.

 

So i've been having some trouble lately where my HDD's are getting too hot for my liking (46'c) when on games. So i brought 8 new fans to replace 2 i had. Yes that's right, 6 extra fans all as intakes.

The inside of the case is cold and the components within never get warm. But my HDD's never cool down. I have even tried removing the side of my case and blowing a desk fan at them and they still won't keep cool.

 

Going into unraid and manually spinning the disk down i can see the drives drop by as much as 3'c in 5 minute and keep dropping so it seems to be an issue with the disks never spinning down.

 

The drives have a 15 minute spin down time and disk 2 is always offline (no user data on that drive). Today i shut off all my dockers so nothing is using Parity or Disk 1. The only thing using these drives are 2 windows machines which have network drives but these are not being accessed.

 

I am able to spin down these 2 drives but within 20 seconds they spin straight back up and i don't know why. The GUI shows no share streams when it does this. My drive are still staying super warm due to this as they can not spin down. I have attached my system log but i honestly can not see why these drives never give up and turn off.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Also as a further question to keep my drives cool, has anyone tried running dockers directly from a usb 3.0 pen drive?

When running just windows with the drives set to never spin down i never saw more then 26'c out of these drives in the same case as it is now, so i have no idea what i could move to help this issue fixed

 

Regards,

Jamie

 

 

PC Info

Unraid Version: 6.1.6

 

System specs

CPU: Intel 5960X @ 4.4GHz

Memory: 32GB DDR4

Motherboard: asrock x99 ws-e

HDD Array: 3 x 4TB WD Red (1 Parity, 2 Storage)

Other Storage: Samsung SM951 NVMe

GPU's: Nvidia 780, Nvidia 750ti, Nvidia 210

Other Extras: 2 USB 3.0 Controllers

 

Storage Allocation

HDD Array: 5 Shares, stores 2 vdisks for VM's

NVMe Drive: Stores 2 vdisks for VM's

 

VM's

 

VM 1

7 CPU Cores

12GB Ram

100GB Image (On NVME Drive)

USB 3 Controller (passed directly via PCI)

GTX 750ti

 

VM 2

7 CPU Cores

14GB Ram

100GB Image (On NVME Drive)

USB 3 Controller (passed directly via PCI)

GTX 780

Onboard Audio

 

Dockers

Nginx - linuxserver.io

MySQL - linuxserver.io

EMBY Server

 

Plugins

Powerdown Package

Unassigned Devices

server-diagnostics-20151224-0332.zip

[JonathanM]

So i've been having some trouble lately where my HDD's are getting too hot for my liking (46'c) when on games. So i brought 8 new fans to replace 2 i had. Yes that's right, 6 extra fans all as intakes.

Could you take a picture of your case with the side off and indicate where the fans are and what direction they are blowing? I get the feeling from your description that you are just circulating air in the empty spaces inside your case, instead of sucking air over the hard drives. Ideally all the air coming in to the case should have to pass over the drives first, so any fans not directly between the hard disks and the outside air should be exhaust, not intake.

[bigjme]

Hi Jonathan,

 

I will grab some pictures first thing in the morning (I'm from the UK so it's 4am)

 

Until then as a point of reference, here is some further details of  my case and cooling

 

Case: thermaltake x9 snow edition

 

I have a similar layout to this image

 

The 4 fans on the bottom are exhaust, and are attached to a 480mm radiator which cools my 5960x and gtx 780.

 

I have 8 fans in the top as intakes to force the extra cold air down through the case and out via the rad. The blue area at the front of the case is a 220mm fan that blows directly onto the middle of the case as an intake also.

 

The hdds are in a cage similar to seen in this image

 

this is on the right hand side of the case with the 220mm fan blowing on it, at the bottom with all 8 fans blowing down on them as well with nothing obstructing the way. The radiator and 4 exhausts are located on the left behind this so all air is pushed down to the bottom of the case and out there

 

Is this enough info? The bit that confuses me is I ran this system 24/7 on windows and the drives never got warmer then 32'c exactly as they are now. Except with a few less fans in the top as intakes which were additions today but the issue has been happening for about 2 weeks now

 

Regards,

Jamie

[JonathanM]

Wow. That case does NOT look friendly to HDD cooling. Are there openings below the HDD cages that would allow all that air to escape past them? It appears that the airflow is all going to bypass the drives unless you do some radical baffling to force circulation between the drives.

 

Another thing that bothers me, is trying to force the warm air back down. Wouldn't it make more sense to help the hot air rise out of the top, rather than try to blow cold air down on top of the warm air?

[PeterB]

That case looks awful, far too many holes - very difficult to design efficient cooling.

 

I have an older, and smaller, Thermaltake case with fifteen drive bays (three 5 drive hot-swap frames with all the fans removed).  I have all the openings in the case sealed off, except for the three fan apertures (all extracting from the case).  All the air coming into the case has to come through the drive bays.  Having some fans as intake, and some as exhaust is not terribly effective - the exhaust fans simply suck out the air which has just been blown in by the intake fans.

 

I live in the Philippines, with ambient temperatures which are usually in the low 30s celsius - even now, 2pm mid winter, the thermometer in my bedroom is reading 31C.

 

I start to get agitated if my drives report temperatures in excess of 40C, but that very rarely happens.  The highest reported temperature, currently, is 38C.

 

I think that the only way to cool drives in your case is to design ducts to channel the air between fans and drives, and make sure that the air has to pass between the drives, not around the outside of the frames.

[bigjme]

The entire bottom of the case is air holes. The only reason I force the air down is because the radiator is mounted at the bottom of the case.

 

The only reason I have the case is because where I have it, I needed a low case with support for a 480mm fan. The only heat dumped into the case is the motherboard and hdds.

 

I have left my system over night again and my hdds seem to have actually spun down now. Sitting at around 28'c in a 24'c room.

 

I don't plan on keeping the drives in this case much longer as I plan to move them into a DAS with a 24bay server case.

 

I have no idea why my drives are spinning down now but wouldn't before. I have hated the hdd cages in this case since day 1. But it's good for watercooling so I couldn't really complain.

 

Regards,

Jamie

[eagle470]

I'm currently experiencing this same issue. I just moved all of my docker apps to a dedicated 120gb ssd to conserve power. But drive 1 and the parity drive dont spin down. I'm open to suggestion