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Drive Sleep


jsunjones

Question

New to StableBit DrivePool, how do I ensure drives will sleep when unused.  I have a basic setup and drives are not sleeping according to smartctl.  I do not have BitLocker enabled.  Note: this is something I want to validate before buying

Windows 10 Pro
Power Profile - Balanced -  has 5 min Drive Sleep enabled
Drives are Internal SATA (5 x 8TB WD, 3 x 6TB WD)

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On 2/27/2022 at 4:19 AM, Diodato said:

The only way I was able to get the drives enter sleep was to de-install DrivePool and Scanner, since it wasn't my main PC setup.

gotcha.  thanks anyways.  one of my larger gripes with drivepool.  ive tested on a brand new fresh windows 11 install.  added drivepool and sleep immediately stopped.  throttled smart scanning through timer and work window, disabled bitlocker detection in the json and still no sleep on any of my drives 24 hours later. 

disabled the drivepool service specifically and they immediately started sleeping.   should be a higher priority for the dev id think.  summer months are coming and people using drivepool tend to be using lots of drives in small spaces in a non enterprise environment.   it gets ~75f in my upstairs office and with 24 7200rpm disks in a chassis i'd prefer them to be spun down if nobody is plex'ing etc. 

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Hi,

I have decided to post as a reply and not a new question.

I have the same problem as some people: with DrivePool Service running my external USB drives don't sleep. Looking at drive activity in Resmon I can see regular access every second to all my three external USB disks (drive letters D, E and F). As soon as I stop the DrivePool Service such access ceases. And my disks will spindown after the amount specified in the active Power plan. The second image was captured just a few seconds after stopping the service to still show the past access activities. My Pool is not yet setup - no pool disk created.

And yes I have set the BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect setting to False.

My Windows is Win10 1909 build 18363.815 and DrivePool version is 2.2.3.1019

How can I allow my drives to spin-down?DrivePool_Service_running.PNG.3e42bdc2e5b25eec40f1a54e8e70a102.PNGDrivePool_Service_stopped.PNG.a4cfb6479d06939f31fadc39cd15f179.PNG

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14 hours ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

If you have StablEbit Scanner installed as well, make sure that you enable the "throttling" option in the SMART settings tab.

Yes I do have StableBit Scanner and yes the throttling is enabled and set to 60 minutes.

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To make sure, you have the bitlocker detection disabled, and the SMART queries throttled? 

Do you have CloudDrive installed?  If so, it has a similar bitlocker detection option, and may be worth disabling. 

And do you have the drives configured to idle/sleep in the Windows power settings? 

Otherwise, if you're still seeing the drive being kept awake, it may be worth checking something like process monitor or process explorer to see what is accessing the drive in question, to see what is keeping it awake. 

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Hello again Christopher,

On the machine in question only DrivePool and Scanner are installed. I have CloudDrive but I use it on a different PC on a different LAN.

I have verified thrice just to be sure and here is my setup and observations:

- PC setup: Win10 1909 build 18363.815, DrivePool version is 2.2.3.1019 , Scanner version is 2.5.6.3336

- Three USB disks attached (drive letters D, E and F) (TerraMaster D5-300C enclosure)

- Scanner has under SMART throttling set to 60 minutes, "only query during the work window or if scanning" set and "do not query if the disk has spun down" also is set.

- DrivePool is not configured for any pool disk, as if just installed. DrivePool has "BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect" set to "false" (both Default and Override)

- the DrivePool Service is Stopped

- the active power plan of Windows has disk spindown set to 3 minutes. All three disks are not spinning.

- Procmon64 shows abolutely no processes accessing the D, E or F disks

- Resmon (disk tab) shows absolutely no activity for disks D, E and F

Now as soon as I enable the DrivePool Service the disks wake up and never again go to sleep. You can see in the Resmon that every second there is access to all three disks. In the image in my previous post accesses to disk D are obvious, but if look with attention, every second there are very subtle marks also for disks E and F (very small peaks). Procmon continues to show that nothing is accessing disks D, E and F.

If I stop the DrivePool Service I stop seeing in Resmon disk access for these three disks and after three minutes (whatever is set in the power plan) the go to sleep.

Once again if I restart the DrivePool Service the disks wake-up and I start seeing the same every second disk access activity in Resmon. Again the disks will never spin-down. Not until I stop the DrivePool Service.

 

Now I do not want to say that the DrivePool service is the culprit but it took me a very long time to narrow down what is causing my external USB drives not to sleep. Because Procmon was useless (no process was accessing the disks) I started stopping different services and have observed the above described behavior with the DrivePool Service.

As the authors of DrivePool I am kindly asking for suggestions what to do to have my external disks spin-down or how to continue investigating. It might be a Microsoft Windows or USB driver problem or other but I would like some help or directions with the next steps. Thanks in advance. Cheers.

 

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On 5/20/2020 at 1:49 PM, Diodato said:

Hello again Christopher,

On the machine in question only DrivePool and Scanner are installed. I have CloudDrive but I use it on a different PC on a different LAN.

I have verified thrice just to be sure and here is my setup and observations:

- PC setup: Win10 1909 build 18363.815, DrivePool version is 2.2.3.1019 , Scanner version is 2.5.6.3336

- Three USB disks attached (drive letters D, E and F) (TerraMaster D5-300C enclosure)

- Scanner has under SMART throttling set to 60 minutes, "only query during the work window or if scanning" set and "do not query if the disk has spun down" also is set.

- DrivePool is not configured for any pool disk, as if just installed. DrivePool has "BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect" set to "false" (both Default and Override)

- the DrivePool Service is Stopped

- the active power plan of Windows has disk spindown set to 3 minutes. All three disks are not spinning.

- Procmon64 shows abolutely no processes accessing the D, E or F disks

- Resmon (disk tab) shows absolutely no activity for disks D, E and F

Now as soon as I enable the DrivePool Service the disks wake up and never again go to sleep. You can see in the Resmon that every second there is access to all three disks. In the image in my previous post accesses to disk D are obvious, but if look with attention, every second there are very subtle marks also for disks E and F (very small peaks). Procmon continues to show that nothing is accessing disks D, E and F.

If I stop the DrivePool Service I stop seeing in Resmon disk access for these three disks and after three minutes (whatever is set in the power plan) the go to sleep.

Once again if I restart the DrivePool Service the disks wake-up and I start seeing the same every second disk access activity in Resmon. Again the disks will never spin-down. Not until I stop the DrivePool Service.

 

Now I do not want to say that the DrivePool service is the culprit but it took me a very long time to narrow down what is causing my external USB drives not to sleep. Because Procmon was useless (no process was accessing the disks) I started stopping different services and have observed the above described behavior with the DrivePool Service.

As the authors of DrivePool I am kindly asking for suggestions what to do to have my external disks spin-down or how to continue investigating. It might be a Microsoft Windows or USB driver problem or other but I would like some help or directions with the next steps. Thanks in advance. Cheers.

 

Did you ever figure this out?  I mean you figured out it was drivepool but beyond that a fix?  Ive been dealing with this ever since i installed drivepool.  I installed it just after installing my HBA and new disk chassis so assumed it was the old LSI card not being able to pass sleep commands.  Everything I found said it should so i decided to start shutting things off.   

Turned off the 3 drivepool services (well 6) but for the 3 softwares as I have all 3 installed.   Drives all sleeping like a baby now.   Obviously need to be able to enable the drivepool service before I set up my pools but i'd love to figure this out first. 

I did try procmon myself and same thing, drives didnt pick up activity there but its repeatable via testing.  been at it almost all day. 

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I just found this annoying problem to and don't want to go for a refund either as I apart from the drives not sleeping issue I love the software. is anyone at stablebit aware or working on this ? 

electricity is not so expensive where I am in Japan but I'd really like my drives to sleep for environmental reasons in this day and age ! 

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update , I edited both json files for drive pool and drive scanner and still not working.

Then I found this fix. in my case I was using an LSI raid card flash to HBA mode , I think this is quite common.

I followed option 2 , the regedit version of this solution and the drive pool drives are now sleeping.

https://homeservershow.com/forums/topic/11859-lsi-spindown-win-81win-10win-2016/#comment-123066

now I don't need to listen to 5 drives spinning away doing nothing most of the time and i'm saving 5W x 5 = 25W of power.

My system is low power imbedded Celeron using under 10W but the tv I plug it into is horrendous making the power saving a little bit meaningless, but at least the noise is gone.

and yes , I know permanently running drives can last longer but this is the real world and we have to live alongside these machines :)

 

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Has anyone found a fix for this? Tried changing the value but everytime the value is set to true after starting the service. Also tried stopping service->editing value->restart pc but it always goes back to true. Disabling the service does not seem to have effect on the usage of the pool. Can this service be permanently disabled, or disabled after boot?

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Update: Got them all going to standby now after using a utility called hdparm to set disk standby timer directly to the disks instead of using the setting from windows power management. Very happy!

Edited by lvau
works now
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 Just to add to this post. This solution of editing the BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect json entry works for me, however it is important that you change the default value of the Override value for BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect entry in both the CloudDrive AND and DrivePool json files. Change Override from null to false. These two json files should be located here:

  1. C:\ProgramData\StableBit CloudDrive\Service\Settings.json
  2. C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Settings.json

Stop the two CloudDrive AND and DrivePool services and then edit the json files. Restart services.

Change this entry. It is normally at the top of the JSON file.

 "BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect": {
   "Default": true,
   "Override": null
 },

to

 "BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect": {
   "Default": true,
   "Override": false
 },

More info here http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings

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Yea, unraid was/is a non starter for me due to existing data and the filesystem difference etc.  i have a few hundred TB and it would be all kinds of incomprehensible mess I dont have time for with kids. 

Now had i saw this whole data obsession/hobby thing becoming what it was.. i definitely would have taken a different path if i was starting from scratch but it is what it is.

I will concur that the stablebit suite is without parallel windows side.  its served me well for quite some time and I honestly hope it will serve me well until that fateful day hopefully some time a reaaaaally long time from now lol.  I love it.

that being said, the spindown issue is not inconsequential.  when youre looking at a chassis with 30x7200rpm disks crammed within a half an inch of one another in an upstairs office spinning 24/7, the summer months prove a huge issue.  I just cant run my air cold enough without making the rest of the house a fridge.   Theres also the power savings however miniscule from letting them spin down.   The age old argument surrounding which is the lesser evil for longevity etc. 

i know until i began using drivepool, i always had my drives spin down and would still be doing so if i were able.

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