Spin down SAS drives


doron

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As a heads up, it looks like the plugin doesn't first enable spindown on the drive (in order to allow the feature to be made active and place into standby, then bring them back out, some [well, all 27 of mine at least] drives simply won't acknowledge the spindown request until set to enabled). The command used to enable is mentioned earlier in the thread, but I guess it didn't make it in, or maybe isn't applying equally to all drives?

sdparm --flexible -6 -l --set SCT=54000 --set STANDBY=1 /dev/sdWhatever

 

Drives now spin down properly - confirmed both via command, and thankfully by UPS power reading! :D 

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55 minutes ago, BVD said:

As a heads up, it looks like the plugin doesn't first enable spindown on the drive (in order to allow the feature to be made active and place into standby, then bring them back out, some [well, all 27 of mine at least] drives simply won't acknowledge the spindown request until set to enabled). The command used to enable is mentioned earlier in the thread, but I guess it didn't make it in, or maybe isn't applying equally to all drives?


sdparm --flexible -6 -l --set SCT=54000 --set STANDBY=1 /dev/sdWhatever

 

Drives now spin down properly - confirmed both via command, and thankfully by UPS power reading! :D 

Setting STANDBY=1 enables the drive's internal standby timer. Setting SCT=nnnn sets that timer span to be nnnn tenths of a second. Basically, what you're doing here is setting an independent spindown schedule for your drive, to go to standby after 90 minutes of idling. 

 

This is a perfectly valid approach. It is, however, independent of Unraid's spindown schedule config and will also not be reflected in the UI.

The plugin takes a different approach - as described, it listens to the Unraid schedule and follows it, so your settings and the monitoring remain mostly relevant.

 

If you are happy with your solution - perfect. If you want to use the plugin and feel it doesn't work in your case - please post in the Plugin Support page.

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Interesting... My drives weren't acknowledging the spindown requests, and I figured maybe it was their OEM firmware requiring specific/unique fields. I'd prefer to stick with the plugin so I have a single source of control for drives spindown across the array of course - I'll do some further tinkering to validate whether this is drive or config specific (I've hacked up the crap out of this thing lol), and if it's drive related, update the plugin thread with details.

 

Thanks!

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1 hour ago, BVD said:

Interesting... My drives weren't acknowledging the spindown requests, and I figured maybe it was their OEM firmware requiring specific/unique fields.

That's something I'd be curious to take a deeper look at if okay with you.

Assuming the SCT thing is clear and you're using the plugin, once one of your SAS drives is allegedly spun down, can you issue this command:

sdparm --command=sense /dev/sdX

against that drive and post the result?

If the drive is indeed spun down, you'd see something like --

"Additional sense: Standby condition activated by command"

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  • 2 months later...

smartctl change for -n option has now been included for SAS/SCSI Drives.

 

Changeset 5127

 

 32020-12-05  Douglas Gilbert  <[email protected]>

 4

 5        smartctl: expand -n option to include SCSI. Code from Simon

 6        Fairweather. Still thinking about how to handle SCSI "stopped"

 7        state which requires the user to send a SCSI command to restart.

 

@limetechthis change is not in 7.1 but will be in 7.2. Not sure if you would use the source from this build or wait for the 7.2 one which I think will be at the end of the year. here: https://circleci.com/gh/smartmontools/smartmontools/1121

  • Thanks 1
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  • 2 months later...
On 12/6/2020 at 2:53 PM, SimonF said:

smartctl change for -n option has now been included for SAS/SCSI Drives.

 

Changeset 5127

 

 32020-12-05  Douglas Gilbert  <[email protected]>

 4

 5        smartctl: expand -n option to include SCSI. Code from Simon

 6        Fairweather. Still thinking about how to handle SCSI "stopped"

 7        state which requires the user to send a SCSI command to restart.

 

@limetechthis change is not in 7.1 but will be in 7.2. Not sure if you would use the source from this build or wait for the 7.2 one which I think will be at the end of the year. here: https://circleci.com/gh/smartmontools/smartmontools/1121

Will this be automatically included in the 6.9 betas or any manual action required?

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3 hours ago, gtilburg said:

Will this be automatically included in the 6.9 betas or any manual action required?

Hi, It is not in any current release. I am hoping it will be included in the next rc. Also there was an issue with r5127 in 7.2.

 

I submitted a patch and it was applied under r5179. So upto this revision would need to be included. Current vers in rc2 is

 

smartctl 7.1 2019-12-30 r5022 [x86_64-linux-5.10.1-Unraid] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-19, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org


https://www.smartmontools.org/changeset/5179

 

 

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I'm having a strange issue.

All my drives will spin down and stay spun down, despite applications and whatnot using them.

 

This causes a cascading failure of the entire system. Everything becomes unresponsive, dockers start to malfunction and all my shares disappear. Only fix is to reboot the server.

 

I'm not sure what the issue is, seems to be related to the most recent update of the plugin, as it's never done this before.

 

Using Unraid 6.9.0 RC2 with spindown 0.85

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