In writing out this explanation of the role a drive's rotational speed plays in parity check speed, I realized that there's no reason a data drive should continue to spin for an hour (or whatever the spindown timer is set to) after it is done being read in a parity check.  Why not send the drive the spindown command as soon as it is done being read?  Saves power and heat.  Of course this will only affect servers with mixed capacity drives, but that is very common.

 

If the drive is still being accessed by something other than the parity check then it should not spin down.  I believe this behavior is already in place, so no changes are needed there.

 

Probably a fairly low priority tweak with all the 5.0 stuff happening.

This might seem a simple tweak request, but it could require some larger changes in the drivers to facilitate. I'm not sure the low level driver knows if it is or isn't being used by external programs and only used by the parity check threads. It's not desirable to have larger driver changes at this point.

 

I'm in agreement with Brit. Plus the return on investment in time is not worth as much as some of the newer features that are being put in place.

 

This could probably be achieved at the user level.

Reset all spin down timers to 15 minutes if a parity check/sync has been detected.

When parity check has completed, reset all timers back to where they were.