Hi,  have a couple of disks in my array that are constantly spinning. I'm 90% sure one of them is because I have a vdisk for a windows VM on one of them, I think that's a seperate problem so I posted that here. However the other disks that don't spin down don't appear to have anything particularly special on them that should be open.

 

Is there a way to see what files are open which could be preventing the disk from spinning down?

Might have been simpler to keep them in the same thread, since the information we need to get (diagnostics) and possibly even the recommendations will be the same. We'll see how it goes here and maybe I will lock that other thread or merge it. That will make it easier to coordinate our responses if they are in one thread.

 

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete diagnostics zip file to your next post.

Hi @trurl, sorry, I was just thinking in terms of people searching for answers in the future which is why I asked in two different posts.

 

I was having a problem a few days ago that @Squid helped out with here: 

 

 

The problem at that time was all the disks were spinning up immediately after you pressed spin down. That problem seemed to go away after a few days after I fixed a problem @Squid identified with disk 6 (clean file system in maintenance mode). 

 

But now, a few days later, every time I check the array all the disks are spinning again. Yesterday when I spun them all down I also reset the counters and left the browser window open. A day later they're all spinning. The counters show a huge amount of reads on all the disks, but the only thing that does a lot of reading is Plex and looking at tautulli (pretty log viewer for Plex) the amount of stuff actually played isn't that huge at all.

 

As I've been writing this post I first spun down the disks, now as I write this paragraph they're all spinning again. Plex isn't streaming anything at all.

 

So I figure it's got to be a problem with the underlying system somewhere. Any advice appreciated. I've attached a diagnostics file I just generated a minute ago.

 

zeus-diagnostics-20190422-1020.zip

There are a few plugins that might help figure this out.

 

Dynamix Active Streams

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/34889-dynamix-v6-plugins/

 

File Activity

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/54808-file-activity-plugin-how-can-i-figure-out-what-keeps-spinning-up-my-disks/

 

Open Files

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/41196-open-files-plugin-can-help-with-troubleshooting-why-server-wont-shut-down/

 

thanks @trurl, I'll try them.

Again, I've started by spinning down the disks. 

 

Open files shows a few things open on disk4 and disk2 such as a VM vdisk and a video someone in the house is streaming which explains those disks (although I still would like to be able to spin down disks with vdisks that windows has spun down). But everything else listed is in the cache. Active streams shows nothing at all (which is because the video is being streamed via binhex-plespass docker). I've started File Activity running.

 

The rest of the disks are spun down for now but experience tells me that won't last very long. Hopefully file activity will tell me.

Most times its just because someone vistited a directory with links to other directorys on your server... the cache plugin should counter this... but it doenst or not always what ever...^^

Hi again, I've been completely unsuccessful in capturing the problem with File Activity and as before Open Files and Open Streams doesn't tell me any thing useful - i.e. I clear File Activity, spin down the disks, wait a few minutes, then magically every disk is spinning again but no logs in File Activity at all (i.e. zero).

 

File Activity works if I say play a file in plex for example so that doesn't appear to be the problem. If it's what @nuhll said about "someone vistited a directory with links to other directorys on your server" that would probably be my media directory which is spread over every disk. I'd have thought that was pretty common though. I'm going to try playing with the Dynamix Cache Folder Settings. The pressure is set to 10 by default, I'm going to switch that to 1 and see what happens.

 

Definitely not the cache directories plugin, tried everything there including uninstalling it, made no difference. Was suggested I try unmounting any smb streams. Although active streams doesn't ever say anything is open but perhaps my Mac is indexing files or something. 

Definitely not my Mac or any other computer on my lan browsing shares. They were all off last night and the disks still kept spinning up for no apparent reason. Anyone have any idea what to try next?

The screenshot below is what I mean by they keep spinning up for no apparent reason. Before taking this screenshot I spun down the disks and cleared the stats. There's 1 read of disk4, yet the entire array has spun up. This is wasting my power not to mention my hdds and I've tried everything suggested so far extensively and I'm getting no where. please help. Fresh diagnostics attached.

 

zeus-diagnostics-20190428-0930.zip