stopped array, drives don't spin down?

[darckhart]

I am running v6.9.0-beta1.

 

I want to check if this behavior is normal.

 

From "Main" tab, I clicked stop array (did not power down, nothing else, just stopped array).

First thing it does is spin up all the drives in order to stop which seems weird to me but OK. So it does the thinking animation and does whatever it needs to do and finally changes status to "array stopped." Awesome.

But all my drives are still spun up.

I come back to check hours later, and all the drives are still spun up. 

If the array is in stop mode, shouldn't the drives all spin down after a period of time? (like it normally does when nothing is being accessed?)

Seems weird behavior to me.

[JorgeB]

3 hours ago, darckhart said:

If the array is in stop mode, shouldn't the drives all spin down after a period of time?

No, they only spin down with the array running (after not being used for the set time).

[darckhart]

Thanks for clarifying.

Is there any documentation that might explain the reasoning behind this? (searched a bit but is difficult to find)

Suppose I can submit a feature request too.

[itimpi]

7 minutes ago, darckhart said:

Thanks for clarifying.

Is there any documentation that might explain the reasoning behind this? (searched a bit but is difficult to find)

Suppose I can submit a feature request too.

Never seen anything documenting this (I did not know it was the behaviour).  My guess is that as people tend to not leave their Unraid servers powered on without the array started for any length of time it is not something that has come up before.

[JorgeB]

My guess is that as people tend to not leave their Unraid servers powered on without the array started for any length of time it is not something that has come up before.

That would be my guess also, what's the use case of having the server started with the array stopped?

 

 

[darckhart]

It wasn't so much a use case as me being dumb and forgetting.

 

I stopped the array after its partiy check bc I wanted to fiddle with the cache pool and then fiddle with my router settings and I didn't want anybody else to be accessing the content on the array while I was doing those things. As you can imagine, getting involved with this and bunch of other distractions, by the time I go back to the main webpage to check things, I have a ton of notifications that all my hard drives are Danger! Too hot! (Summer here is hot.) I think to myself that that doesn't make sense, but sure enough all the drives were all spun up when I was expecting them not to be. So I figure it'd be nice behavior that regardless if the array is enabled or not, the drives should be spun down if no activity after X time.

 

 

[Squid]

10 hours ago, darckhart said:

I have a ton of notifications that all my hard drives are Danger! Too hot!

Add more cooling.  The drives are just sitting there doing nothing other than spinning.  During a parity check / rebuild the heads are actually moving, so even more heat will be generated.

 

What kind of temperatures are we talking about?

[darckhart]

7 hours ago, Squid said:

The drives are just sitting there doing nothing other than spinning. 

 

So IDK exactly how hard drives work when there's no reads or writes, but physically there's clearly a difference for when the drives are "spun down" versus "spun up" yes?  And while they aren't "doing anything," spun up is always hotter. OK so far all makes sense. But if not "doing anything," then shouldn't they be optimized to reduce power, etc, etc? Just seems like good practice. Even hard drives on my external USB dock seem to go idle after a period of time.

 

Anyway, if all drives are spun up (there's 10x HDDs packed together), they'll start at a relatively normal 28C, and even when "doing nothing," come up to about 33-35C in the course of a couple hours. The Too Hot warning comes on around 50C I think, which I agree, should not have occurred, if the drives were "doing nothing." (So that's something different to look into I suppose. Maybe it WAS doing something.)

 

I add more cooling when I'm doing parity check (run it at night, open windows, turn on fan and point it at the box), but during the day, unless it's a hot day, I'll get complaints like "the fan's too loud and noisy" "why's it on when no one's in that room" etc etc. It's already in a small box without ability to add more cooling because of the complaint "it looks so ugly" "it's too loud" etc etc

 

Like I said, I'm just trying to understand the default behavior since it was not what I thought would happen. And trying to determine if what I thought was supposed to happen even makes sense in the first place. (Like I notice the cache drives never spin down regardless. Which I guess sort of makes sense since they're cache drives. And I store my dockers on there so I don't particuarly want them to be slow to access anyway.)

Edited June 1, 2020 by darckhart