Do I need to define any spinup groups for a config with 4x SATA drives on a Supermicro X7SBE and 16x drives attached to AOC-SAT2-MV8 controllers? Running 4.5 official. Thanks much!

The system should automatically detect if any drives are on the same shared host.  If you go to the Devices page, you will see the "hosts" assigned to each drive.  For example,

 

pci-0000:00:1f.2-scsi-1:0:1:0 [b]host6[/b] (sdi) Hitachi_HDS721010KLA330_GTH000PAH00LLH

 

This drive is on host6.

 

Each drive is assigned a spinup group named after it's host.  So if there are multiple drives sharing a host, they will be in the same spinup group.  You can go to the 'Disk' pages accessed from the Main page for each disk and change this if desired.  Make sense?

Ok, thanks! Took a look and I have each drive with its own host, so I disabled the Spinup Groups.

I'd like to resurect this topic.  

 

20 drives, 8 will be on 1 AOC SAS and 8 on another.. with the remaining 4 drives attached to the mobo.

 

15 of the drives will have a user share "movies" defined (streaming to popcorn hours) and the others will be exclusive user shares including only the drive they reside on.

 

I dont want stuttering or delays however I would like to use as little power and generate as little heat as possible.

 

Appreciate any suggestions now that spinup groups have been implimented for a while.

 

 

I'd like to resurect this topic.  

 

20 drives, 8 will be on 1 AOC SAS and 8 on another.. with the remaining 4 drives attached to the mobo.

 

15 of the drives will have a user share "movies" defined (streaming to popcorn hours) and the others will be exclusive user shares including only the drive they reside on.

 

I dont want stuttering or delays however I would like to use as little power and generate as little heat as possible.

 

Appreciate any suggestions now that spinup groups have been implimented for a while.

 

 

Spinup groups cannot accomplish both of your goals. 

 

To minimize stuttering, you MUST put into place the default spinup groups. (Typically these will be pairs of drives on the same IDE cable)  From what I've seen otherwise, unless an SATA controller is set to an IDE emulation mode, each disk is in its individual spinup group, and therefore, they do not affect (or, more accurately, should not affect), each other.

 

Then, all drives involved in a single access session from your media player must spin up at the same time, otherwise, there will be a delay when moving from one file to another on an idle disk.  This feature does not exist in spinup groups unless you put ALL your disks in one big group.  (If any spin up, all spin up)  That does not work with your second goal of being green.

 

I personally have 10 disks holding movies.  For my older media players the movie listing is too long to navigate easily, so I set up "shares" for alpha ranges of movies.  I then moved my files so they were on as few disks as possible for a given alpha range.

 

Then, I wrote a script that will spin up the disks holding files on the same share as the one being accessed.  That was the tricky part.

 

Now, If I access the "Movies A-D" share, all the disks having a top level "Movies A-D" directory spin up immediately.  If I access the "Movies T-Z" share, just those disks having a top level "Movies T-Z" directory spin up.  It is all automatic.

 

Now, I did have to physically move all the movies around on the various disks since I originally had movies everywhere regardless of their alpha titles.  With so many movies beginning their title with "THE ... " Initially I had a "Movies T-Z" share on every disk, and they'd all spin up.

 

Now, I only have a Movies A-D on three disks, E-J on four, K-O on two, P-S on fours disks, and T-Z on two:

root@Tower:/boot# ls -d /mnt/disk*/Movies\ A*

/mnt/disk1/Movies\ A-D/  /mnt/disk2/Movies\ A-D/  /mnt/disk3/Movies\ A-D/

root@Tower:/boot# ls -d /mnt/disk*/Movies\ E*

/mnt/disk3/Movies\ E-J/  /mnt/disk4/Movies\ E-J/  /mnt/disk5/Movies\ E-J/  /mnt/disk6/Movies\ E-J/

root@Tower:/boot# ls -d /mnt/disk*/Movies\ K*

/mnt/disk6/Movies\ K-O/  /mnt/disk7/Movies\ K-O/

root@Tower:/boot# ls -d /mnt/disk*/Movies\ P*

/mnt/disk10/Movies\ P-S/  /mnt/disk7/Movies\ P-S/  /mnt/disk8/Movies\ P-S/

root@Tower:/boot# ls -d /mnt/disk*/Movies\ T*

/mnt/disk10/Movies\ T-Z/  /mnt/disk11/Movies\ T-Z/

 

It took several days for scripts I wrote to move all the files to their proper physical disks to minimize spin-ups. (And several iterations before I figured out how to even write a script to shuffle the files among the disks. )  Believe me, after about a week I had the disks all populated with their respective alpha ranges of titles, and all having the same proportional amount of free space based on their original size and the other "data" files stored on them.

 

At some point I'll redo the top level shares and try to get those alpha ranges on 4 disks to only exist on 3, but at the time I created them it seemed to balance out the numbers pretty well.

 

In any case, the script I use is called spinup_when_accessed.sh and is attached to this post: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4858.0

 

Joe L.

I'll go back and check my bios settings, but my drives are showing up on the same port using AOC-SASLP-MV8's.  Each controller is seen as a port and all attached drives are showing up as that port.

 

Any ideas on this.  Using SUPERMICRO X7SBE mobo.

 

thanks for the reply..

 

here's how they are reporting:

 

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy0:1-0x0000000000000000:0-lun0 host1 (sdb) WDC_WD20EADS-00R6B0_WD-WCAVY1963799

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy1:1-0x0100000000000000:1-lun0 host1 (sdc) WDC_WD20EADS-00_WD-WCAVY1838688

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy2:1-0x0200000000000000:2-lun0 host1 (sdd) WDC_WD20EADS-00_WD-WCAVY2158996

 

I'll go back and check my bios settings, but my drives are showing up on the same port using AOC-SASLP-MV8's.  Each controller is seen as a port and all attached drives are showing up as that port.

 

Any ideas on this.  Using SUPERMICRO X7SBE mobo.

 

thanks for the reply..

 

here's how they are reporting:

 

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy0:1-0x0000000000000000:0-lun0 host1 (sdb) WDC_WD20EADS-00R6B0_WD-WCAVY1963799

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy1:1-0x0100000000000000:1-lun0 host1 (sdc) WDC_WD20EADS-00_WD-WCAVY1838688

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy2:1-0x0200000000000000:2-lun0 host1 (sdd) WDC_WD20EADS-00_WD-WCAVY2158996

 

With spinup groups active, and with the default spinup group of "host1" assigned to all those drives, they will all spinup when any one of them is accessed.

 

You will need to experiment if they need to act that way... it is just assumed they will by the unRAID software.

You might be able to re-assign them spinup groups host1a, host1b, host1c, and host1d to minimize those that spin up.

kind of the direction i was leaning.  thanks as always for the help and advice.

 

 

 

I'll go back and check my bios settings, but my drives are showing up on the same port using AOC-SASLP-MV8's.  Each controller is seen as a port and all attached drives are showing up as that port.

 

Any ideas on this.  Using SUPERMICRO X7SBE mobo.

 

thanks for the reply..

 

here's how they are reporting:

 

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy0:1-0x0000000000000000:0-lun0 host1 (sdb) WDC_WD20EADS-00R6B0_WD-WCAVY1963799

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy1:1-0x0100000000000000:1-lun0 host1 (sdc) WDC_WD20EADS-00_WD-WCAVY1838688

pci-0000:04:00.0-sas-phy2:1-0x0200000000000000:2-lun0 host1 (sdd) WDC_WD20EADS-00_WD-WCAVY2158996

 

With spinup groups active, and with the default spinup group of "host1" assigned to all those drives, they will all spinup when any one of them is accessed.

 

You will need to experiment if they need to act that way... it is just assumed they will by the unRAID software.

You might be able to re-assign them spinup groups host1a, host1b, host1c, and host1d to minimize those that spin up.

You might be able to re-assign them spinup groups host1a, host1b, host1c, and host1d to minimize those that spin up

 

 

Is anyone doing this with success? 

Resurrecting this again. Using unRAID v4.7, all of the drives I currently have on one of the AOC cards are "assigned" (didn't do anything manual, so assume the system did it that way automatically) to "host2" and, as a consequence, all of them end up spinning up when any one of the are accessed:

 

disk2 device: pci-0000:02:00.0-sas-phy0:1-0x0000000000000000:0-lun0 host2 (sdb) WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WMAZA1851098

disk3 device: pci-0000:02:00.0-sas-phy1:1-0x0100000000000000:1-lun0 host2 (sdc) WDC_WD20EARS-00_WD-WCAVY5682204

disk4 device: pci-0000:02:00.0-sas-phy2:1-0x0200000000000000:2-lun0 host2 (sdd) WDC_WD20EARS-00_WD-WCAYY0288947

disk5 device: pci-0000:02:00.0-sas-phy3:1-0x0300000000000000:3-lun0 host2 (sde) WDC_WD20EARS-00_WD-WMAZA0099284

disk6 device: pci-0000:02:00.0-sas-phy4:1-0x0400000000000000:4-lun0 host2 (sdf) WDC_WD20EARS-00_WD-WMAZA2237899

 

I, too, am trying to go for 'Green.' I don't *think* I'd mind any minor lag if a needed media file happens to be spanning >1 disk. I see that clicking on any of these disks in the Main UI leads to a disk settings page which features a text-entry field "Spinup group(s):" This is currently displaying "host2" for each of the disks as dictated by the list above.

 

What alternative string do I put in that field to separate each of the disks from each other in terms of spinup groups?

I >think< if I'm understanding the usage correctly, I can put any name string in the spinup group field and as long as each of them is a different string, they'll not spin up together, is that right?

yes.

Thanks!