I'm trying to build a table of drive model numbers, of drives that will return SMART data when they are spun down, without them spinning up.  So far I have:

 

WD 10EA*

WD 15EA*

WD 20EA*

WD AAKS series

WD2002FYPS

WD3200BEVE

WD800BEVT

WD2500BEKT

Samsung HD103SI

 

Please post any others, and I'll update this OP with them.

Add to that:

(tested)

The RE-4: WD2002FYPS

Scorpio Blue: WD3200BEVE

Scorpio Blue: WD800BEVT

Scorpio Black WD2500BEKT

 

* WD6401AALS, Caviar Black, displays temp and SMART while spun down

 

It might be useful to compare the feature sets and capabilities listed for the drives, using the hdparm -I command.  With my limited set of drives, I see some candidates in the following (from the WD6401AALS):

    Power-Up In Standby feature set

  * SET_FEATURES required to spinup after power up

  * DMA Setup Auto-Activate optimization

    unknown 206[12] (vendor specific)

    unknown 206[13] (vendor specific)

 

The SET_FEATURES line seems to me an interesting candidate.  After comparing lists from other drives, especially that Samsung you mentioned, if there is not one good line, then there is still the possibility that you can use the other lines (checked/active or exists but unchecked) to indicate the family vintage of WD firmware that usually supports SMART-on-standby.  (Wish there was a SMART-on-standby feature listed!)  This seems more reliable than depending on a user-driven table, requiring constant updating.

* WD6401AALS, Caviar Black, displays temp and SMART while spun down

 

I suspect all the WD AALS drives  do also.

Has anyone seen a 1TB or larger drive that does NOT return SMART data when spun down?

 

I'm considering just assuming that any drive of 1TB or larger can return SMART when spun down.

The SET_FEATURES line seems to me an interesting candidate.

 

Unfortunately not.... at least two WD drives in my system that *do* return SMART when spun down (WDC WD5000KS-00MNB0 and WDC WD5000AAJB-00UHA0), don't report this attribute.

hitachi 2tb 7k2000's do not but this also means at a glance i can tell which drives are spinning or not.

hitachi 2tb 7k2000's do not but this also means at a glance i can tell which drives are spinning or not.

You don't really need to call smart in order to see that.

for i in /dev/[sh]d? ; do hdparm -C $i 2>/dev/null ; done 

 

i dont have a problem with not being able to see temps of a hdd that isnt spinning, wouldnt it be one of the cooler drives as its not running so it doesnt matter?

I just ran a test on a Seagate 1.5T 5900RPM drive.

 

It did spin up the disk to do the smartctl command, but unRAID immediately spun it back down.

 

No Seagate drive I've tried will run smart without spinning up the drive (up to 1.5T).

To put it bluntly... managing spindows is a bitch.

 

unRAID has a process for each disk, that monitors that disk's I/O activity.  HOWEVER, calling smartctl does a very low-level access of the device, that unRAID can not see that access ... so as far as unRAID is concerned, the disk has had no access for hours, so when it sees it spinning, it believes it should be spun down.

smartctl does a very low-level access of the device,

that unRAID can not see that access

unRAID can not see that access. 

unRAID must have this knowledge though: "Hey, wtf? I spun down that disk not even 2 min ago, and now it's up and spinning again?

Shall I keep spinning it down till it turns blue? Or shall assume that it's up for a reason, and wait 30 minutes before I try that again?"

 

Don't go behind unRAID's back and you won't have a problem.  Next thing people will complain that "when I dismount a drive, why does unRAID disable it... why don't it just remount it."

Has to be done.

 

When I dismount a drive, why does unRAID disable it... why doesn't it just remount it?

incase it isnt what it appears to be... and stuffs everything up.

I'm trying to build a table of drive model numbers, of drives that will return SMART data when they are spun down, without them spinning up.  So far I have:

 

WD 10EA*

WD 15EA*

WD 20EA*

WD AAKS series

WD2002FYPS

WD3200BEVE

WD800BEVT

WD2500BEKT

Samsung HD103SI

 

Please post any others, and I'll update this OP with them.

 

I just build a setup on unRAID 4.5.4 with 1 data and 1 parity, both WD20EARS (jumpered 7- for a start.

After the first spindown/idle period has been reached, the drives are reported as spundown

and temps are showing in the Web-UI. (These are basically the ambient temps of the case).

However, after some more idle cycles..the drives are still spundown and the temps are shown as "*".

 

...maybe the EARS have more than one "sleep-level"?