Prevent unassigned drive from spinning down

[dEAd0]

Hello all,

 

I've recently built my first unRaid server and am pleased with most of the functionality it offers.

One thing I cannot find is the possibility to prevent unassigned drives from spinning down. 

I use 2 seperate drives as media sources for plex that really do not need to be in my array, but I want to keep them spinning for various reasons.

I've installed the Unassigned devices plugin to use/share/mount them which works as intented, but unfortunately it does not offer me this option.

 

Does anybody know a plugin or script to force these drives to never spin down?

 

PS: my old server which ran on Windows Home Server 2011 did this through a simple program called nosleepHD, drives have 65000+ hours on and this worked flawlessly.

 

Thanks in advance!

Orrin

[dlandon]

9 minutes ago, dEAd0 said:

Hello all,

 

I've recently built my first unRaid server and am pleased with most of the functionality it offers.

One thing I cannot find is the possibility to prevent unassigned drives from spinning down. 

I use 2 seperate drives as media sources for plex that really do not need to be in my array, but I want to keep them spinning for various reasons.

I've installed the Unassigned devices plugin to use/share/mount them which works as intented, but unfortunately it does not offer me this option.

 

Does anybody know a plugin or script to force these drives to never spin down?

 

PS: my old server which ran on Windows Home Server 2011 did this through a simple program called nosleepHD, drives have 65000+ hours on and this worked flawlessly.

 

Thanks in advance!

Orrin

Read this about not having UD spin down drives:

This will keep UD from applying a drive spin down timer.  The drive may be spinning itself down though.

[dEAd0]

17 minutes ago, dlandon said:

Read this about not having UD spin down drives:

This will keep UD from applying a drive spin down timer.  The drive may be spinning itself down though.

I'm not sure which specific best practice you are referring to. I can't find an obvious reason but that could be my inexperience speaking  

[dlandon]

14 minutes ago, dEAd0 said:

I'm not sure which specific best practice you are referring to. I can't find an obvious reason but that could be my inexperience speaking  

Quote

A drive that is not mounted will show spun down and will not show temperature unless a script file is created.  The Disk Attributes will also be disabled for the drive.  The easiest way to handle this is to click on the edit script icon, select the default script, and then save it.  The default script does not do anything with the drive.

Sorry, this refers to not spinning them up.  UD always applies a spin down timer of about 30 minutes.  There is no way to turn that off.  Disk activity should keep it spun up.

 

If you have the cache_dirs plugin installed, be sure that it is not caching your UD disk so disk activity will keep it spun up.

[dEAd0]

Quote

Sorry, this refers to not spinning them up.  UD always applies a spin down timer of about 30 minutes.  There is no way to turn that off.  Disk activity should keep it spun up.

Hmm, I see. That's unfortunate.

 

The thing is, there is nowhere near enough disk activity to keep them spun up. 

The main reason I want to keep them spun up is the access time. I really can't stand when I need to wait 20-ish seconds for a network share (in this case movies/tv shows) to load. 

I do not use the cache_dirs plugin by the way  

 

I'ts not a real issue that the spin down timer can't be changed in the UD plugin as long as there is another way through a script or different plugin.

So back to my main question: Is it possible to force my unassigned drives that are mounted, to never spin down?

 

Again thanks in advance and for your fast reply!

[JonathanM]

Add a user script to copy some file to null every few minutes.

[eagle470]

Actually a user script to 'touch' a file every 29:59 minutes.

 

I came across this as I was looking for an answer for my dad who is running a windows VM with BlueIris and 3 1TB laptop drives in a raid in storage spaces through Unassigned drives.

 

I made a windows scheduled task to keep the drives from spinning down. I thought I'd share it here.

You will be able to import that in Windows 7 or higher.

Drive Keep Alive - File Touch.xml

Edited March 25, 2020 by eagle470

[lzrdking71]

@dlandon@jonathanm

 

I am just piecing things together but would this work?

 

hdparm -S0 $(ls /dev/sd*|grep '[a-z]$') >/dev/null 2>&1

 

Disclaimer, I am not experienced with this at all......it was cobbled together with things I found in the forum so take this as a question and not as a solution to anyone reading this. If it does, now I need to figure out how to add it to user scripts.

 

Thanks for your time in advance if someone decides to help figure this out.

 

Looks like I may have answered my own question. It may be what was posted above that shows as a dead link......not sure.

 

Update: No more errors after adding to the drive script as indicated in the above link .

 

Edited June 14, 2020 by lzrdking71

[slidermike]

@lzrdking71 I am having a similar issue with a couple of UD spinning down (but not wanting them to).
I believe your command argument is correct for my needs.
Where did you apply this?
I know each UD device has its own .sh  in the /var/tmp folder.    
Did you apply it in one of those scripts or create a separate script (cron)?

Thank you 

[lzrdking71]

On 8/12/2023 at 1:58 PM, slidermike said:

@lzrdking71 I am having a similar issue with a couple of UD spinning down (but not wanting them to).
I believe your command argument is correct for my needs.
Where did you apply this?
I know each UD device has its own .sh  in the /var/tmp folder.    
Did you apply it in one of those scripts or create a separate script (cron)?

Thank you 

 

@slidermike You may be able to change it in another place but if you go to the main tab and then to the section where it lists your unassigned devices, click the gears settings icon. 

 

Once clicked, I added :

 

# This will prevent this drive from spinning down
    hdparm -S0 $DEVICE

 

below

 

    # This will refresh the UD webpage when the script is finished.
    /usr/local/sbin/rc.unassigned refresh $DEVICE

 

above

 

  ;;