How to have drives go to sleep while the StableBit DrivePool service is running?

[Katz777]

I am currently trying to set up a external storage (3 x 8TB Drives one as Parity using SnapRaid) in a TerraMaster D4-300 for my plex media files and have downloaded StableBit DrivePool to trial it. It seems great but when it runs on my PC (Windows 11 Pro) none of my drives ever sleep. As I don't really want my drives on all the time due to heat, noise and energy costs I'd like for the disks to power down when not in use after 15 minutes or so. I did read other people with this complaint and one suggestion was to turn off Bitlocker but I am not using Bitlocker. Another suggestion was to use a utility called hdparm to set power off times for each individual disk but I can't find a windows download for this as it appears to be a Linux utility.

My Media server gets light use and ideally I would like for the disks to spin down when not in use then for the individual drive in use to spin up when a media file is accessed from the Plex server which runs from my Windows 11 PC.

Any advice on how to get the disks to sleep while the DrivePool service is running would be great.

[VapechiK]

hello

even if you're not using bitlocker, you MUST change the setting value from null to false in the DrivePool json file.  otherwise DP will ping your disks every 5secs or so, and your disks will never sleep at all anyway.  then you begin messing around with windows settings to set when they sleep.  folks here have had varying degrees of success getting drives to sleep, some with no luck at all.  in StableBit Scanner there are various Advanced Power Management (APM) settings that bypass windows and control the drive through its firmware.  i have read of success going that route, but have no experience at all since i am old school and my 'production' DP drives spin constantly cuz that's how i like it.

to change the json:

https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings 

there are many threads here on this topic as you have seen, but of course i can't find them easily now that i'm looking lol...  perhaps @Shane or @Christopher (Drashna) will provide the link where Alex (the developer) explains the APM settings in Scanner and the whole drive sleep issue in general in greater detail.

tl;dr

you must turn off bitlocker detection first before your drives will ever sleep.  BTW if you ever trial StableBit CloudDrive you must change the same setting in its json as well.

good luck

Edit:  found the link:  

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

 
 

[Shane]

Note that hdparm only controls if/when the disks themselves decide to spin down; it does not control if/when Windows decides to spin the disks down, nor does it prevent them from being spun back up by Windows or an application or service accessing the disks, and the effect is  (normally?) per-boot, not permanent. If you want to permanently alter the idle timer of a specific hard drive, you should consult the manufacturer.

9 hours ago, Katz777 said:

My Media server gets light use and ideally I would like for the disks to spin down when not in use then for the individual drive in use to spin up when a media file is accessed from the Plex server which runs from my Windows 11 PC.

An issue here is that DrivePool does not keep a record of where files are stored, so I presume it would have to wake up (enough of?) the pool as a whole to find the disk containing the file you want if you didn't have (enough of?) the pool's directory stucture cached in RAM by the OS (or other utility).

[Katz777]

@VapechiK Thanks for your replies and advice, I will work through your suggestions tomorrow when I have time, I really appreciate your response and the links I should be able to get somewhere with all that information🙂

 

@Shane Thank you that is all very useful to know. I am not sure if DrivePool will be suitable if all the disks are spinning up for each access but I will try and resolve the sleep issue first and then test to see how it works out with Plex.

[VapechiK]

oh you're welcome

just as an afterthought and to perhaps clarify, if DrivePool is the only StableBit product you are trialing, simply turning off bitlocker SHOULD solve the sleep issue and allow windows to handle normal drive/sleep control duties.  since Scanner is a drive health monitoring utility, it must occasionally communicate with the drives, thereby potentially waking them up.  yes there are settings within that allow user control over them and that is all fine and dandy but, if it's not installed then it's not there to further complicate things initially.

perhaps just get DrivePool up and running as you like and the sleep issue handled first, then see about Scanner.  i myself wouldn't run a pool without it; the wealth of info it provides about my system in general is well worth the price of admission, and the occasional alert i've received has nipped any real trouble in the bud.  long story short here, the second link provided while very interesting and helpful indeed, is mostly moot unless StableBit Scanner is actually installed.  and, i can't imagine any scenario where one MUST have Scanner installed in order for drive sleep to happen simply because DrivePool is installed.  if you already have both DP and Scanner installed, well great.  you can't go wrong there.

let us know how it goes and how you finalize your setup

 

[Katz777]

@VapechiKThanks again for the additional info, sadly didn't have time today to have a go at the fix but will have time tomorrow. I do really appreciate your help and I'll let you know how it goes!

[andrewds]

On 7/30/2023 at 12:00 AM, Shane said:

An issue here is that DrivePool does not keep a record of where files are stored, so I presume it would have to wake up (enough of?) the pool as a whole to find the disk containing the file you want if you didn't have (enough of?) the pool's directory stucture cached in RAM by the OS (or other utility).

Is that true? I asked for clarity on this exactly several days ago but never got a response.

[andrewds]

@Katz777I just went through this recently after setting it up several months ago. I use Scanner, DrivePool, and CloudDrive. I had to update my Scanner settings not to query SMART more often than once per hour, and not to wake drives to query. I also had to disable BitLocker detection in the JSON config file. I didn't need to do anything with CloudDrive. Once I made those changes and a couple of Windows config changes everything worked fine.

Last time I updated DrivePool the BitLocker detection flag was reset to default and the drives wouldn't sleep anymore.

I did need to enable options 13 and 15 as described in this post in order to set the power options that worked for me. https://www.thewindowsclub.com/configure-hidden-power-options-in-windows-10

[Shane]

4 hours ago, andrewds said:

Is that true? I asked for clarity on this exactly several days ago but never got a response.

To quote Christopher from that thread, "StableBit DrivePool pulls the directory list for the pool directly from the disks, and merges them in memory, basically.  So if you have something that is scanning the folders, you may see activity."

There may be some directory/file list caching going on in RAM, whether at the Windows OS and/or DrivePool level, but DrivePool itself does not keep any form of permanent (disk-based, reboot-surviving) record of directory contents.

[andrewds]

43 minutes ago, Shane said:

To quote Christopher from that thread, "StableBit DrivePool pulls the directory list for the pool directly from the disks, and merges them in memory, basically.  So if you have something that is scanning the folders, you may see activity."

There may be some directory/file list caching going on in RAM, whether at the Windows OS and/or DrivePool level, but DrivePool itself does not keep any form of permanent (disk-based, reboot-surviving) record of directory contents.

To quote my response to Christopher:

" If I'm understanding the rest of your explanation correctly, you're saying that anytime the application needs to retrieve a file from any disk in the pool all of the disks will wake up from sleep so that DrivePool can determine upon which disk a file is residing in order to deliver it back to the application. Is that correct?"

Your response still doesn't answer it clearly. Is there caching or isn't there? Will the drives wake up any time there is an application that needs to retrieve a file from any disk, or does DrivePool mitigate that somehow? Should I expect to see disk activity on all disks any time a file on a single disk is retrieved or are there times when DrivePool can deliver file location information without waking every disk?

[Shane]

At least when testing on my own machines there is caching going on - but my opinion is that's being done by Windows since caching file system queries is part of a modern operating system's job description and having DrivePool do it too seems like it would be redundant (although I know dedicated caching programs e.g. PrimoCache do exist). Certainly there's nothing in DrivePool's settings that mentions caching.

Whether a disk gets woken by a particular directory query is going to depend on whether that query can be answered by what's in the cache from previous queries.

[Katz777]

Just to update I did manage to get the constant spining to work but unfortunately anything I access information from the drive pool all disks spin up. So it doesn't look like drivepool is going to be suitable for me this time but I will keep it in mind for future use. Thank you to everyone who helped me!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Just a heads up, the bitlocker detection can cause the drives to be awakened by WMI.   You can disable this functionality: 
https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings

And it is the example too.

Also, make sure that you're not using A:\ or B:\ as the drive letter, as windows has hard coded behavior to ping these drive letters, under the assumption that they are floppy drives. 

And if you have StableBit Scanner installed, enable the throttling option for SMART.