DrivePool & Drive Sleep

[4Frame]

Hello everyone! I purchased DrivePool last night and set it up to pool 2 drives for movie storage/access, but I'm having an issue I didn't have before when the 2 drives were on a RAID 0 array.

 

I have WHS2011 with Scanner and DrivePool working together, using the SSD Optimizer plugin to feed data to disks, and it all works great, but over the course of the day, i've noticed my 2 hard drives are more frequently spinning up than before. 

On my RAID 0 array, the disks never spun up unless they were specifically being accessed. So I did some checking, and DrivePool states the pool is balanced and everything appears "idle". I also checked Scanner and saw throttling wasn't enabled. So I enabled throttling to not scan the disks for more than 30 minutes at a time (The disks are set to standby after 10 minutes, and it worked great when it was raided). 

But now, the disks spin up more frequently (i'd say every 10-15 minutes I hear them spinning up now) and it's really strange. I searched some posts here and I haven't seen anyone posting about this issue yet. I'm willing to test anything anyone suggests, as I really would like to use this on my 4 other drives for main storage, but it would really be disheartening if this started happening to those drives as well.

 

Is there anything I'm missing, or anything I can do?

 

[4Frame]

Ok so I think I might know what's going on. The drives are going to sleep, and I just watched both drives go to sleep right now. I launched Scanner when the drives fell asleep and checked the "Power" tab, and of course it's reading the drives as still "Active", which means, in 30 mins, it will query the drives anyway which will power them up. I am using the UnsafeDirectIO to be able to query smart info from them, so I'm wondering if that's the issue. Although, if my memory serves me correctly, I could almost swear Stablebit Scanner was able to query my drive's power state perfectly fine before. 

 

Will continue testing!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Check the balancing settings. You can set it to occur at a specific time of day, or immediately but not more than once every X hours (12 may be a good setting).

 

Als, you could set a work window for StableBit Scanner. And once you've done that, you can set it to only query during the work window.

[4Frame]

I narrowed everything down to Scanner. Drivepool is perfect on its own, doesnt query any of my hard drives.

Since I have a RocketRaid 642L using the UnsafeDirectIO option, it seems scanner can't tell when the drives are on standby so it will mark the drives as "Active" and constantly query disks and keep them awake. I could set SMART query throttling to a time limit, but the max is 1440 minutes (24 hours) and that's still not what I want to do. I do have the work window set but this will wake up the drives at 3AM and keep them on untill 6AM because of the constant smart queries.

 

I think the main issue here is my RAID card... I need a raid card that supports DirectIO even though I wouldnt be using the raid functionality, it would be nice just to have the raid option if i ever needed it. If not, plain jane sata card would do.

I want the true versatility of Scanner to shine through, which is, if a disk is sleeping, let it sleep unless i wake it up. if the disk wakes up, you can query SMART data until the disk goes back to sleep.