Will the final release of UnRaid 4 support individual disk spin down times, rather than an overall global time for all drives as in UnRaid 3?

Not planned - how would you use this feature?

I would use it so that frequently accessed data would spin down in say 1 hour, such as media art, and music.  Then on movie drives, data drives, etc. they could spin down after 5 minutes because i would not likely be using them as much.

 

Of course if there were writable user shares, then it would not matter as much.

 

By spinning down drives sooner, save a little electricity, plus when multiplied by every user, good for the enviro.

By spinning down drives sooner, save a little electricity, plus when multiplied by every user, good for the enviro.

 

Hats off to you for looking for ways of saving energy, but the grand sum of all your drives spinning for an extra 55 minutes is like two light bulbs left on for the same period of time - i.e. not much.  You would be better off searching for the enormous impacts on the environment.

 

Stop eating beef, for example (no, I am not a Vegan or even a vegetarian) as raising cows for beef is a huge consumer of fresh water and is the least effective way of creating food as measured by calories generated per gallon.  Ride a bike to work or at least when cruising around town.  Walk to the local coffee shop.  Buy recycled paper products (I used to live next to a paper mill - horrible place).  Don't toss your used alkaline batteries in the trash (nearly everyone does that).  Plant trees in your community.  Stop buying nasty chemicals for around the house when environmentally-friendly ones are at least similar in effectiveness and price.  Buy local produce as foreign produce wastes an enormous amount of energy just getting it to you.  Recycle cans/paper/cardboard (my town makes it easy, but not all towns do).

 

There are probably websites dedicated to low-pain, high-gain ideas (carbon neutral stuff, perhaps?)  If someone knows of one, pass it along.

 

BTW, I am not trying to come off as preachy - I only do about half of the items above on a consistent basis (as an example: I own three cars, none of which gets over 22mpg, argh!, but I do live very close to work).  I just want to see people get the best bang for their efforts.  Penny foolish, pound wise - that is how I roll.

 

 

Bill

It is not a lot of power, no.  S3 hibernation would be a bigger impact though I think.

 

Each drive being what, 15w?  It would add up a bit.  It drives me nutz to leave the lights on if they are not being used, so the same goes for my hard drives.  The actual impact is small, but the principal is there, and why not do it? 

 

Would the drives last longer, or shorter?  Is it better to keep them spinning for the 55 minutes, or to start them and stop them more repeatedly I wonder...

 

*edit*

This reminds me of a story I heard long ago from Apple too.  When they were making the Apple IIE (I think) one of the creators, perhaps Jobs, was addiment about saving ever second of boot time, because when the machines were turned on once a day times millions of computers, over a couple years they would save 100's of lives.  Well ok, lifetimes worth of time, but it was an interesting way to look at it, and I never forgot it.

Not planned - how would you use this feature?

 

Disappointing, because as mentioned by a few of us in the Suggestions forum, this is a big "need to have" feature.  I put it #1 on my list of wanted features.  In fact, it's the only thing I find lacking in the software.

 

Why?  Because of cover art.  In Media Center, whenever you go to the Music or DVD menus and the drive is spun down, it takes forever for it to access the cover art and display the screen.  I used to get this problem EVERY time I finished watching a DVD - it would error out when trying to go back to the menu because in the 2 hours since I started the DVD all the other drives had spun down.  I ended up setting the spin down time longer just to avoid that issue.

 

Separate spin down times for each drive is probably not necessary, but being able to designate ONE drive to NEVER spin down would be awesome.  Then I would always have my cover art and My Movies database available, and the rest of the drives (which are mostly DVD rips) would only spin up as needed.

I also would like either individual timeouts per drive, or ability to set one drive to never spindown.

 

Although not an unRAID box (yet) I have an Antec 450w power supply, on an Asus K8N-E mobo.  Athlon 64  (2.8gHz).  1GB RAM.  13 drives, most WD 250GB, and a couple of Seagate 500GB.

 

I did some surgery on the AC cord and put a meter on the cord and took measurements.

 

Peak at power-on is about 450W for a fraction of a second.  About 275w for 2 seconds.  Booting process is about 220 watt average, falling off to 180 watts stable after boot.

 

With all drives spun down, CPU underclocked and undervolted with RMClock to 100gHz and .85 volts, I get down to a floor of 80 watts.

 

S3 suspend mode, gets me 0 watts.... or at least below the sensitivity level of my clamp-on meter which is 2 watts.

 

All that said, I am less concerned about power consumption than I am by heat produced and noise.  All my computers sit in my "office" area and the heat is noticeable (of course, most comes from the big honkin Dell LCD monitor and my desktop, but every little bit hurts).  Of course, most power consumption is turned into heat, so in effect, I *am* concerned about power consumption indirectly.  Noise, particularly from the "always on" stuff like the server, is a big concern.  I undervolt/underclock the Athlon not for power concerns, but so the CPU fan can be slowed down and silenced (CPU temp undervolted is 31).  The Antec power supply also uses a variable speed fan, based on PS temp.  With all drives spun down, my server is silent.

 

I had the same problem with my cover art and the HTML/PHP code used to drive my media player.  So I configured an alias in Apache and configured Apache to create no access log.  On boot, I create a 200MB RAMDisk, copy the necessary directory from the drive to the RAMDisk, and all the drives can spin down while still maintaining snappy performance of the UI on my media player since all the images, HTML and PHO to run the UI are on the RAMDisk.  I configured a 15 second timeout in php.ini, so when I select a media file from the UI, and Apache goes out to play it, the 6 second or so delay while the drive spins up will not timeout.

 

 

Individual spin down, need to have ?. naa. But nice, yes.

 

Need is security, UPS support, mailalert and whathave you, things that are needed for running a safe server.

/Rene

 

 

 

 

 

We did add this item to the 'laundry list' some time ago:

 

- implement shorter disk spin down delays; also would be nice to have per-disk control of this

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=266.0

 

The plan is to get the 4.2 release out (security and full User Share support) and then start a series of fast releases, adding many of the "small" features from the list.