I'm posting this hoping it will help others decide if they want to try S3.

 

Have you been thinking about or reading about S3, about making your unRAID system save more electricity than you get just spinning down the drives when not in use?  Read this before you spend a bunch of time setting it up as this might help you decide if the S3 *feature* really fits your situation.

 

S3 - Suspend To RAM

 

It sounds really cool to do.  Wow, my whole system including drives, fans etc will stop!  

Some advantages:

  o All moving parts will last longer because of reduced use.

  o Save on electricity big time.

  o Really silent operation when suspended.  Eerily quiet!

  o No dust being sucked in because fans don't spin.

  o Bragging rights!  Chicks dig it!

 

Disadvantages

  o Magic Packet required to wake it up.

  o Windows machines will complain about mapped drive connections being not available.

 

 

Ok, so are the disadvantages any big deal? Well, for me, they are a total deal breaker.  Here's why:

My setup is at my home which means my users are my family.  And I'm capable of understanding that I need to run a command line program (wolcmd) in order to send the magic wake-up packet to unRAID and wait a couple of seconds before I even try to open up an Explorer window on a folder located on the unRAID machine.  But my family members would likely open the Explorer window and glare helplessly at the monitor as Windows takes half a human lifetime to do a network timeout and then pop up a message about the folder being unavailable.  All this is followed by a desperate call to me "Where are my files! Shriek!  You said this would be easy!"  

 

Ok, so lets recap a bit to see if S3 fits your needs:

 

1) Are your users using Windows and mapping drives to unRAID folders?  If yes, they might be uncomfortable with the way Windows will pop up messages or freeze up when the unRAID server is sleeping.

 

2) Are your users nerdy enough to understand about the magic packet?  You will have to copy the wolcmd or something like it onto all your Windows, Mac or linux machines so it can be sent from any of them by the user.  If so then maybe they can remember to run the shortcut or command to send the magic packet before they try to access unRAID files/folders.  However, if they aren't nerdy enough then S3 is probably not a good feature for you to use.

Thank you very much for breaking it down so simply, I've been wondering about this exact thing.  To clarify, the magic packet command can be condensed to a simple desktop shortcut, correct?

 

Also, I'm already used to the lag time of waiting for disks on my server to spin up before their files are accessible.  This lag time is something like 5-10 seconds (I haven't actually timed it).  How much extra time would waking the computer up from S3 add to the current spin-up lag?

 

Finally, would my XBMC Live running Revo be able to send magic packets as well?

Finally, would my XBMC Live running Revo be able to send magic packets as well?

It can, but you would have to write a script to send it, and then bind the script to a button, and then remember to press the button.  Again, not really friendly for your family unless you can define a macro for your remote.

Thank you very much for breaking it down so simply, I've been wondering about this exact thing.  To clarify, the magic packet command can be condensed to a simple desktop shortcut, correct?

 

Yes.  The wolcmd.exe is an executable you can run from a shortcut.  It takes parameters so I made a cmd file called wakeup.cmd and have a shortcut to it instead.  This is exactly whats in my wakeup.cmd I used to wake mine up.  I downloaded wolcmd.exe and copied it into my c:\bin folder.  

 

    cd c:\bin

    wolcmd.exe 6C:F0:49:17:48:07 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255

 

Also, I'm already used to the lag time of waiting for disks on my server to spin up before their files are accessible.  This lag time is something like 5-10 seconds (I haven't actually timed it).  How much extra time would waking the computer up from S3 add to the current spin-up lag?

 

For me it seemed an additional few seconds above just the drives spinning up.

 

Finally, would my XBMC Live running Revo be able to send magic packets as well?

Any process that can run the command line or a shortcut can send the magic packet.