Drive Spin Down Schedule

[Taddeusz]

Is there a way to schedule drive spin down? I currently have my drive spin down delay set to 1 hour. The problem we have is that in the evenings when we are watching stuff on SageTV we experience UI delays as it is waiting for drives to spin up and sometimes video playback problems while drives are spinning up in the background.

 

I'd like to have a way to disable drive spin down in the evenings when we are most likely to be interacting with the server and then re-enable it after a few hours. I know how to configure cron but I don't know the commands I need to change the drive spin down.

[Squid]

You could use the Auto Turbo Mode plugin, and schedule turbo mode when you want all drives spun up, and disable turbo mode when you want it off.  

[Taddeusz]

Just now, Squid said:

You could use the Auto Turbo Mode plugin, and schedule turbo mode when you want all drives spun up, and disable turbo mode when you want it off.  

I tried that yesterday and the drives still spun down. I had turbo enabled for 6 hours starting at 6PM.

[Squid]

Yeah, you're right.  If there is no writes at all then the drive's will spin down.  I never notice it on my system (same use case pretty much), as there's always a write happening somewhere sometime.

 

Your alternative is to use spin up groups so that when one drive spins up, they all do (put all the drives or the ones that contain the media) into the same spin up group.  Never tried switching around spinup groups on the fly from the command prompt (if its even possible)

 

You can also minimize the delays with appropriate settings on the cache dirs plugin so that when it does need to spin one up, it only spins up the one required.  You usually need to adjust the settings a bit for more aggressive caching though.

[Taddeusz]

2 minutes ago, Squid said:

Yeah, you're right.  If there is no writes at all then the drive's will spin down.  I never notice it on my system (same use case pretty much), as there's always a write happening somewhere sometime.

 

Your alternative is to use spin up groups so that when one drive spins up, they all do (put all the drives or the ones that contain the media) into the same spin up group.  Never tried switching around spinup groups on the fly from the command prompt (if its even possible)

 

You can also minimize the delays with appropriate settings on the cache dirs plugin so that when it does need to spin one up, it only spins up the one required.  You usually need to adjust the settings a bit for more aggressive caching though.

One of the problems is that when browsing through recordings SageTV reads the first frames of video files to produce a thumbnail and it doesn't cache them. It also doesn't thread or otherwise do this asynchronously so when it hits a file that's on a drive that's in standby the UI freezes until the drive spins up.

 

The other issue I'm not entirely sure about. I'm not sure if it's Unraid that's causing the whole system to briefly freeze or if it's SageTV doing something in the background that causes the video to freeze while waiting for drives to spin up? I hadn't ever experienced this until I started letting the the array drives spin down. I had just been letting them spin continuously. I've never before experienced these kind of system delays related to drive standby. I'm not really sure who to blame or how to determine the exact source of the problem.

 

My system is currently an i5 3470 with 16GB RAM running most of my drives from a PERC 310 in IT mode. I'm about to upgrade to an i5 8400. Waiting on the new RAM to arrive today.

[Squid]

It's the controller causing the pause. Many if not most pause all transfers waiting for a drive to respond / spin up

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