Spin down SAS drives


doron

Recommended Posts

  • 3 weeks later...

I have been wanting this for ages.  My buddy is high up in the storage sector of gov't and he gets the old stuff, ergo I get the old stuff. :) I currently have 7x4TB SAS, 2 cold spares and might get 8 more. SO it would be nice to keep the spin time down seeing as they have been spinning most of their lives. (hamsters are getting tired)

Edited by dbinott
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/2/2019 at 12:43 PM, limetech said:

Anyway eventually might get this working.  Our issue is that we have a single SAS hard drive and that one appears to not work correctly, meaning constant timeouts, etc.  Not much appetite to go purchase a bunch of SAS gear either.

I currently have 2 unRAID Plus licenses and an interest in seeing this happen. If limetech would be willing to offer a trade for a single license upgrade to pro for one of my servers, I'd be willing to send 4 x 4TB WD WD4001FYYG SAS drives (https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Datacenter-Capacity-WD4001FYYG/dp/B00C3WPL0M) to them to replace the single one they are using. These drives are between 4-5 years old, but are still running strong. I'll preclear the drives and run SMART tests again them and send the best 4 from the lot. I'm in the process of decommissioning 9 of these drives in favor of 6 x 6TB SAS drives for my main server.

Link to comment
  • 4 weeks later...

For me I would love this only because I get SAS drives at cost from work so I save money by going with SAS drives. Currently my setup is 8x8TB and 6x6TB with 2x500GB (Unassigned) i drwa about 270 watt just chilling and about 340watt doing folding at home. I just got a RTX 4000 to replace the P2000. So I am pretty sure my power draw is going to go up :(

Link to comment
  • 4 weeks later...
This feature request isn't forgotten, but not top of the list, because by far the majority of users have SATA drives (which is also recommended).
 
Understood. Well, how about the more modest version - see here - of adding a hook / upcall whenever a drive is spun down or up, so we can try to roll our own code to do the deed? Perhaps this can be pushed up?

For those of us with these drives (admittedly a minority), this is kind of a painful issue...
  • Like 1
Link to comment
56 minutes ago, bonienl said:

There is an event "poll_attributes" which is invoked each time a reading of SMART attributes is done (poll time is set in the GUI).

 

Perhaps you can lift on this event to spin down SAS drives?

Interesting idea, didn't think of that one.

Thinking about it, I don't believe it will work; here's the rub: Turns out the hard problem is actually not the spinning down, but rather spinning back up.

 

I've been trying to deal with this issue previously. One thing I tried was to set a SAS drive in the array to auto-spin-down (standby) after a certain idle time, independent of Unraid. You can do that using sdparm (set STANDBY to 1 and SCT to a decent value). Seemed like a good idea. It worked fine to spin the drive down, however the next time Unraid tried to access it, it (or kernel code? I dunno) apparently wasn't aware that the drive is spun down, got an i/o timeout and red-X'ed the drive. There was nothing I could do at that point but rebuilding it.

 

Those attempts lead me to believe that unless this works in sync with Unraid's spin down/up events, primarily up, stuff will break. I could be reading things wrong though - perhaps there is something we can do with that?

Link to comment

Have been following this with interest. I primarily use SAS disks in my system due to a very affordable source! 

 

*touchingwood* also the long term 24/7 reliability of these drives to date has been fantastic - I've got drives which have been in constant operation for 5 years in a production environment before I put them into my unraid server and ran them for another 2 years so far - however with the age of them and the massive waste of power, I am very keen to find a solution to spinning them down! 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
1 hour ago, bladerunner1982 said:

8 SATA disks connected via Adaptec 5805 Controller.....no spin down possible...no SMART...that´s a pity...

RAID controllers are not recommended for those reasons and others. Unless you can configure it to treat the disks individually (and not as a bunch of single disk RAID0) then you can expect to have these problems and it can make it impossible for Unraid to monitor the health of the disks for you. 

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.