Full settings for always spinning (no standby)

[Beaker1024]

Before either of your software my "data" (non-OS) WHS2011 Hard-drives were always spinning down/sleeping after 40 minutes.  I never gave it much thought and lived with the 8-10 sec spinup.  This was just kind of the out of the box WHS2011 power settings and me just thinking that I've saved a few watts for the 80% of the hours they weren't being accessed.

 

After installing your software: Drives seem to be always spinning.  Only downsides are extra electricity ~3-5Watts/drive & possible wear and tear on the HDD??

 

I did find and read the nice thread already discussing how to try to make the drives back to OOB WHS2011 standby/spin down:

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

 

I understand now there's a lot of settings/things to keep track of.  That's ok.  I tried the settings to get they to sleep again and have mixed results on my mix of brands of HDDs.

 

I've now decided to jump camps and goto the always spinning / no standby or idle for the HDDs.  I can live with 15-20Watts of electricity extra.

 

Christopher -

I read that this is your preferred method.  I've done the adjustment in the WHS2011 RPD desktop to the power options for HDD from 40min now to "Never".

 

Anything in the DrivePool scanner settings that you recommend having to change to definitely not interfere with all HDDs always being on?

     A)  Read Power mode directly from disk: on/off? [i've set them all to read directly from disk currently.]) 

       Disk Control -> Advanced power management is greyed out on all my HDDs. 

     C)  I uncheck "Standby Timer" and hit set.  Next time I goto that settings it's the horizontal line in the box.

 

Any comments / thoughts on my perceived notion of extra wear and tear on the HDDs?

BTW - I'm ordering a WD Red 4TB in a few days which should be happy with the always on settings.

 

 

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of spinning the drives down, in part because my server is fairly active all the time. Additionally, we had solar installed in June, so I'm not as worried about electricity costs.

 

But I absolutely understand wanting to have the disks spin down.

And specifically, the issue here is more than likely that StableBit Scanner are constantly "pinging" the disk, when it queries the SMART data.

Open up the Scanner Settings option, and click on the "General" tab. Set the work window, if it's not already. Set the time  to occur when you're going to be active on the server (so the disks will be awake anyways). Then click on the SMART tab, and check the "Only query during the work window or when scanning". 

 

This will only query during that work window, and should allow the disks to sleep better.

 

As for the disk control, that means that your disks firmware doesn't allow you to configure these settings. Some will show the settings, but won't "take". 

 

 

 

Additionally, for StableBit DrivePool, any time something accesses the pool, it may wake up the disks. 

For the first access after a boot, it will wake up the disks. Afterwards, it will cache the file location and wake up only the disk the files reside on.

However, programs such as Windows Search (or other indexers) can cause the disks to wake up more frequently.

 

A test here is to stop the DrivePool service (and the Scanner Service) and see if that curbs the behavior. You can help pinpoint the cause of the disks being woken up this way.

 

 

 

 

As for the wear and tear, that really depends on your use case. Entirely. 

As I said, I use my server a lot. I also share my files with friends and family. I also use a few other tools to identify duplicate files and monitor file integrity. 

Additionally, Plex periodically scans the entire library to update the files and add new files. As does Subsonic.

 

For my use case, leaving the disks on all the time makes sense for me. But that's me. That's not you, and may not be your use case.

 

 

As for the WD Red's, they are a very good option. For sleeping or always on as well. You'll get good performance out of them, as well.

[Beaker1024]

Thank you for the information!  I"m almost to the point where I"m completely settled in with all my Scanner and Drivepool settings. 

 

The one last thing I'm trying to settle on is how often to have the DriveScanner do the surface / sector scan.  I know it's defaulted to 30 days.  Can you give some insite into what your "average" user likes to us (that you've heard)?  I keep thinking of moving it to 15 or 20 days instead of 30.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You are very welcome!

 

As for the surface scans, 30 days should be good enough. If you're paranoid/worried, then 14-15 days may be a better setting. 
Any more frequently than that could cause issues, depending on how many disks you have, how they're connected and how you use the system. 

 

And from what I've seen reported, most people don't change this settings.

However, I have my server set to scan every 14 days. I've tried every 7 days, but on my system, it was stuck scanning all the time.