[RESOLVED] Parity drive spin down?

[puddleglum]

Parity drive(s) never spin down? Why is this? The point of the parity drive is to be able to recover data in the event of a storage drive failure. Parity sync happens on a scheduled basis, it's not an "always, as soon and whenever a change is made" ideology, right? So why don't the parity drives spin down to rest until utilized? Is there a way to make them? I clicked on the down arrow next to one and it comes right back up. Or, am I incorrect in my thinking that a running drive will have a (potentially) shorter lifespan than one that is in a state of rest until called upon?

[limetech]

Is this a SCSI drive?

Are there any other drives spun up?  If there are any writes happening, Parity will also spin up.

Might be helpful to post diags: Tools/Diagnostics

[puddleglum]

No, neither are SCSI drives, just regular drives plugged into the motherboard's SATA ports. No active reads or writes happening, yet other drives are active. I have Plex, Emby and Mumble servers installed, no cache drive. The docker .img is installed on one of the data drives. I'm assuming that's why it's active.

 

What would you like from tools/diagnostics? The whole zip?

 

 

[limetech]

No, neither are SCSI drives, just regular drives plugged into the motherboard's SATA ports. No active writes happening, yet other drives are active. I have Plex, Emby and Mumble servers installed, no cache drive. The docker .img is installed on one of the data drives. I'm assuming that's why it's active.

 

What would you like from tools/diagnostics? The whole zip?

 

No need for diags.  If you have writes happening to array devices, Parity will keep spinning.  Makes sense right?

[puddleglum]

Not really.

Perhaps I have a misunderstanding of how parity works though.

As soon as a data drive receives a "write" it is immediately synced with parity? Ohhhhh (forgive me as I talk through my understanding of how unraid handles data)...I thought the parity portion didn't come into play until the scheduled sync (I have mine set for a weekly sync). So I thought parity should remain at rest until said scheduled action. But, perhaps that's just a check? If that's the case, then yes, if any drive is actively "waiting", as a good server should, then your statement makes absolute sense. Hence one of the reasons for a cache drive. Hmmmm.

 

Thank you very much for your response.