Advised settings for using Stablebit on my Server

[elsmandino]

Hi,

 

I am rebuilding my headless server with a mix of new and recycled parts:

 

MSI B85M-E45 Mobo

G1850 CPU

12 GB RAM (2 x 4GB and 2 x 2GB) - 6GB of this is as a RAMDisk and used for time-shifting

2 x Samsung F4 2TB HDD

1 x WD Red 6TB HDD

64SSD - have both a Crucial M4 and Sandisk Ultra Plus.  Cannot decided which one is best to us.

2 x DVB-T tuner cards

1 x DVB-S2 tuner card

 

It is going to be running Windows 10 as the OS.

 

It is going to be using Argus TV backend for recording TV and playing live TV.  I will also install Emby server to stream DVDs and music.

 

It will also, of course, have Stablebit Drivepool and Scanner installed.

 

My advice, really, is how best to set up Windows and my PVR software to work best with Stablebit.  

 

I will be pooling all three HDDs to give me 10TB space and then letting Stablebit balance recordings based on evenly spacing them over the drives and subject to load/heat.

 

What is the suggested time to tell Windows to spin down my hard drives?

 

I use to have this set at 5 mins but now I am beginning to think that perhaps this is a bad idea because my server is constantly going to be waking up each harddrive in turn to make each new recording and I know that start/stop is far worse for hard drives than having them on constantly.

 

What would you suggest as the best compromise?

 

I was thinking about either turning off spindown altogether  - i.e. as long as the serve is in use, the hard drives are all spinning or setting spindown to a long duration (say 3 hours) so the chances are that any hard drive will be called upon before it has had to spin down.

 

Apologies if the above is quite complicated - any guidance would be much appreciated.

 

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Power management and disk idling is a tricky thing.

 

Just for a heads up, that WD Red is designed to run 24/7, so it doesn't "need" to idle.

 

 

As for getting our products to idle the drives, there are a few things to do:

In StableBit Scanner, throttle the SMART queries. These normally happen very often, and will cause the drive to wake. Throttling them to once an hour or more should help with that.  Additionally, you may want to set a work window for the scans, as this can help pervent performance issues (and can be used to set a specific window when SMART queries are "allowed", as well.

 

As for StableBit DrivePool, it's defaults should be fine. By default, the balancing shouldn't occur more than once every 12 hours, I believe. That should be fine.

However, for activiity, that depends entirely on what is accessing the drives. You can use "resmon" to monitor that, if you want. 

Additionally, the "Ordered File Placement" balancer causes StableBit DrivePool to fill the pool one (or two) disks at a time. This may help with power management, as it should wake less of the disks.

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins

 

 

Aside from that, I'd set the timeout for idling to ~20 minutes.