Switch Off Hard Drives

[GiuseppeChillemi]

Hi,

  I have currently installed 8 hard drives on my Windows 8 homebuilt nas based on DrivePool

  They consume a lot of energy. How could I power them down when not used ?

 

  Regards,

     Giuseppe Chillemi

[Christopher (Drashna)]

This depends on a lot of factors.

 

Normally, Windows Power Management should be able to handle this, and does have a drive idle spindown timer. You may want to try configuring that.

 

Also, set the balancer to:

• "Balance immediately", and enable the "But not more than once every X hours" option. Try setting this to 12 (so it only balances every 12 hours). 
• "Balance every day, at XXXX", and set this to a good time for you (default is 1AM).

These options should help reduce the access to the drive, at least from "us".

 

 

However, do you have any thing else accessing the drive? Indexing it, or the like?
If so, this access will wake up the drives.

[GiuseppeChillemi]

Hi Cristhopher,

   I have checked everything and drive should be with no access at all for the whole day until I make some direct access. Indexing has been confined only to one our a day.

 

   Power consumption for large disk array is an important part for any user. I wish to ask a feature for DrivePool: drive on monitoring which should inform the user with 3 values:

   1) Each drive should have an on/off mark on its side

   2) Each drive should report the total power on for each day and since it has being added to the pool

 

   Hope it could be implemented easily.

 

   Regards,

     Giuseppe Chillemi

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Giuseppe,

 

Well, if it's still not sleeping properly, you may be able to use StableBit Scanner to help with this as well.

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/48-questions-regarding-hard-drive-spindownstandby/

Additionally, if you're having issues with the disk sleeping (due to suspected disk access), you can use "resmon" to see the active disk handles. Just check the "Disk" tab. 

Sysinternal's Process Monitor can do this as well. 

 

 

As for marking the power status, StableBit Scanner does do that already (kind of), but we could see about adding that info to StableBit DrivePool's UI as well (which isn't a bad idea). 

As for reporting the total power .... that's problematic at best. While we may be able to get some stats about the power consumption, but because of how the drives work, we don't know what the active power consumption is at any given time. 

At best, we'd have to estimate that by monitoring the performance of the drives at all times. This would a) require a database to track this, and additional resources to monitor this.    Or to "guess" what the average consumption would be.

 

Regards

[GiuseppeChillemi]

Hi Christopher,

   I have exposed the last part of my proposal in a wrong way. I don't ask for power consuption but total uptime (hours/minutes) per drive: 1) Total uptime since drive has been added 2) Hitsorical uptime per day (1/2 weeks or user selectable) 3) Uptime for the current day,

 

  Regards,

    Giuseppe Chillemi

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Ah, okay. Thank you for clarifying.

 

That may be a lot easier to implement.

And I'll pass the suggestions along to Alex as well.

 

https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/15598

https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/15599

 

Regards