Disk/RAID shutdown?

[deathevor]

Is it possible to shutdown volumes (Drives/Raids) separately. And preferably to do it remotely.

Here's situation.

Raid 0 (2x Seagate 3TB) - for work (backup) - used only during work time.
Raid 0 (2x WD 1TB) - direct storage of some projects - used only during work time.
Seagate 1TB - Media Content storage (Music, Music Videos, Films, Pictures, Downloads, XBMC Lybrary, IP Cam storage etc.) - used almost all the time.

So would be nice if the Raids can be switched off during not work times.

Is it possible to do that?

 

[cyberjock]

If you use the hard drive sleep feature that is in the GUI the drives will go to sleep when they aren't used. If by shutdown you mean make them completely inaccessible then no, you can't. You'd have to manually delete the shares(or export the zpool) and then manually recreate the shares(or import the zpool).

 

[deathevor]

Yes, complete shutdown, without ability to access it until switch back ON (next morning, when start work).
The sleep function not preferable, as they will go sleep and wakeup many times during work time.


Does it worth to add this to Request list?

 

[cyberjock]

I wouldn't expect it to ever be implemented.

The two ways it would be implemented would be to do the stuff I mentioned above, but automate them. If you remove the shares you'd have to cycle the CIFS service. Suddenly everyone doing anything with any Samba shares would be kicked from the share. Loss of unsaved data, potentially corrupt files, and other complains would occur. If you were streaming a movie you aren't now. You'll have to restart the streaming app. You had a word document open, now you don't. You were doing stuff with a mysql database, you can expect corruption.

If you export the zpool you'd see the same thing, but only for files being access on that zpool. Again, bad place to be and I'm sure the forum would fill up with angry users that thought they were saving electricity and not realizing the consequences.

If you are really ambitious you could write up a cronjob to export and import the zpool at specific times and set a shutdown timer. The drives would shutdown after that timer when the export completes. But I really think this is a bad idea overall. You really are talking about 4 hard drives spinning when they aren't doing anything. You'll save about 25-30w. You can probably lower your electric bill by a lot more and much more easily by replacing that incandescent bulb in your living room with a CFL.

It's really about the work versus benefit. It's a lot of work for very little benefit. Not to mention the potential lost work when you walk away from the computer and forget to save and come back to find your last 2 hours of work is gone because the share went offline on its own.

Also keep in mind that hard drives prefer to just be on 24x7. Nobody seems to know why, but drives seem to have longer lifespans when left on eating small amounts of electricity all of the time.

Edit: Don't let me hold you up from trying to get it implemented. But don't be shocked if it sits in the tickets either unanswered or closed with "bad idea". The hard drive sleeping is better because you don't actually kick people offline. If they try to access those zpools the drives will spinup and be accessible in about 15 seconds.

 

[deathevor]

Also keep in mind that hard drives prefer to just be on 24x7. Nobody seems to know why, but drives seem to have longer lifespans when left on eating small amounts of electricity all of the time.

This is a good point to leave them working.

Apart from that:

I'm only one person (1 PC) who will access those Raids. At the moment after finishing a working day, I save everything and make sure backup soft finished it's job.
After that I shutdown workstation and then NAS server. This way I just sure the Drives cannot be accessed*, while I'm not at workplace.
* accessed, through network or directly from workstation if switched on or remote controlled. Or just disk failure due to electricity loss while it's working

So all workflow now is working excellent, no corrupted files, no loss of data, as NAS goes OFF last.

But, apart from work have home network that shares media files. So would like to have a 24/7 space to store all this and access it from any device.
Also thinking to move my website to it (Unlikely)
So not to make (buy) another NAS, thought to have "hard" switch for raid arrays.
To stop them completely and make unacceptable (as it happens now by switching off NAS).


So that's basically whole idea.
Maybe there's another way to achieve the same result.