Drives spin up opening the share, with or without "cache directories"


Pro-289

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I've been battling this for a long time now. I've tried with Dynamix Cache Directories and with it disabled. I have 8 drives and 1 parity, and an SSD cache drive. When I open my share it pauses for a bit while usually 6 or 7 of the 8 drives spin up. Then the share shows. I don't have any drives grouped for spin up.

 

I've even tried accessing the share with a rarely used laptop, and it did the same thing. Tried Windows 7 and 10. It seems it's something in the config of the server since both computers did it.

 

Plugins I have installed:

Community Applications, Dynamix Cache Directories, Dynamix SSD TRIM, Dynamix System Buttons, Dynamix System Information, Dynamix System Statistics, ProFTPd.

 

Not sure if any of the plugins are causing it, or if that's even possible. Sometimes I hate just accessing my library for a 3 second look at something because almost all the drives will spin up.

 

Has anyone run into this before and found a solution?

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Are you using icons/snapshot view for pictures, etc.?   Years ago, I set all of my folders --  left-click on folder, 'Properties', 'Customize', Now set in the "What kind of a folder do you want" to 'General items'.   This speeds up folder display. 

 

Make sure you are not indexing for quicker searches.

 

By the way, Cache Directories is no cure-all.  The more stuff you try to cache, the worse its performance is!  Caching requires a lot of  memory and stuff will get dumped from the cache as required.  I only try to index my media directories and they don't have a lot of entries.  Caching my Windows backup directories (with their tens of thousand of files) has never worked well.  One thing you can do is just to spin-up all of the disks manually before you start directory browsing.  That will cut the aggravation to a minimum...

Edited by Frank1940
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One thing you'd really want to do is exclude your appdata share from the plugin.   If you use Plex as an example, it's appdata would have hundreds of thousands of files which all wind up being "indexed", which may or may not cause the other indexes being dropped from RAM.  Only use cache dirs on the shares which you really want it to keep track of, and limit it as much as possible.

 

That, and there's lots of inline help within the plugin's settings to help you tune it.

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6 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Make sure you are not indexing for quicker searches.

 

One thing you can do is just to spin-up all of the disks manually before you start directory browsing.

I do have a mapped drive letter to the share. Although when I access the share directly using \\IPADDRESS\ it still does the same thing. I checked my mapped drive properties and the indexing option was enabled. I disabled it and it's now going through every file and setting each attribute to disabled. But even after disabling Indexing, the option is still enabled when I go back to properties again.

 

And of course the most annoying part is that every drive has to spin-up ONE BY ONE! If all 8 could spin-up at the same time would be a bit less aggravating, but still annoying that they even spin-up in the first place.

 

I am excluding appdata, system plus a few others I didn't want. I only included the two shares I cared about.

 

There's only two main shares that I have. One has 5,800 files, and the other has 3,200 files. It seems like 8GB of RAM should be able to hold at least 9,000 indexes. But I've noticed every time I transfer files to the array my Cached RAM usage increases as viewed with the System Stats plugin. So I'd assume every time I transfer data to the drives it kicks out the directory cache from RAM. But that would be an issue only while I'm using the Cache Directories plugin. But it seems I have this problem while using the Cache plugin or not, and while transferring data to the drives or not. I think I've even tried to disable viewing thumbnails too. But my folder views are always in Detail mode that doesn't show a thumbnail anyway.

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/16/2020 at 7:38 AM, jonathanm said:

if you open a windows command prompt and navigate to the mapped letter and issue a dir does it spin up the drives?

I'll have to try that next. I uninstalled a few plugins and disabled ProFTP and SSD Trim. Of course I also uninstalled Cache Dirs to see what happens. The only plugins I have enabled now are Dynamix System Buttons and Community Applications.

 

I just opened the mapped driver letter while watching the Array Devices in the web browser. Each drive powered up in numerical order, from 1 to 8. Windows timed out since each drive had to power up one by one. Maybe that's a normal process without Cache Directories, I don't know. I'll have to put CD back and try the process again.

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2 hours ago, Pro-289 said:

 

I just opened the mapped driver letter while watching the Array Devices in the web browser. Each drive powered up in numerical order, from 1 to 8. Windows timed out since each drive had to power up one by one.

That's normal with or without cache dirs, as windows will attempt to open files on the drive for thumbnail or content preview.

 

That's why I said...

On 2/16/2020 at 10:38 AM, jonathanm said:

if you open a windows command prompt and navigate to the mapped letter and issue a dir does it spin up the drives?

 

Opening the drive letter in windows explorer is a much different thing than listing the directory in a command prompt. Cache dirs only works for the names of the files, not the content.

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8 hours ago, jonathanm said:

That's normal with or without cache dirs, as windows will attempt to open files on the drive for thumbnail or content preview.

You may be able to minimize this behavior by right clicking on the Share in Windows Explorer.  Select   Properties  (at the bottom on the List).  Open the   Customize  tab.  Select  General items   from the dropdown list and check the 'Also apply this template to all subfolders'.    Click    Apply   and  OK out of the box.

Edited by Frank1940
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  • 4 weeks later...
On 2/16/2020 at 7:38 AM, jonathanm said:

if you open a windows command prompt and navigate to the mapped letter and issue a dir does it spin up the drives?

I just tried to access the drive letter from the command prompt. Six of the eight drives powered up right after. The directory paused a few times while the drives powered up. A few hours earlier I even had all drives powered up viewing all the folders so the names were all in the cache.

 

And I have fresh install of Cache Directories, where the main items I changed from default are cache pressure to 4 and enabled Scan User Shares. Plus I've also updated to Win 10 and disabled SMB 1.0 to force SMB 2.0+. My last attempt will be to disable Samba altogether and only use NFS.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Interesting thing is when I go to the web interface, I can navigate to the Shares and browse the root and maybe one more sub folder in. But once I get to actual files, just the hard drive that stores those files will spin up. That seems normal though.

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