FreeNas, hard drives and system sleep - Howto?

[Zorin1]

I know there are different thoughts about having your hard drives and system sleep (right term?) but I don't use my Nas that often, maybe once every couple of days and then only use it for about 10 mins or so. So it is really a waste to have it running all day long. What do I need to do to have it spin down the drives and maybe sleep? I would like for it to wake up when I try to access. I'm not sure if this is the same as wake on lan or if that is something different. Anyone know how to do this?

 

[Mirfster]

Search for "standby" in the manual. /Hint: It is in the "Storage" section. :p

 

[joeschmuck]

The answer is not always that simple. If your System Data Set is on your pool then you will not be able to sleep your drives. Also, if you have any jails or plugins on your pool that are active, this too will affect sleeping of your drives. Just keep things like this in mind. If you only use your system every few days, lets say for making a backup of your computer, then you might be better off just turning it off when not in use. The wear and tear on the drives will be the same.

 

[johnblanker]

I am new to FreeNAS. To chime in, it looks like freeNAs was built to be run 24/7. From what I see in the manual, there is no option for the system to enter a sleep state (where you would then need a WOL to start it up). The only option I see is to set your HDDs to spin down. This is a bummer for me too. @ 80watts run 24/7 is about $10 a month where I live. Too get a more accurate reading I would need to leave the system running and calculate over 24+ hours to take into account the spin-down periods. However, only needing the system to be on ~3 hours a day is about $1 a month. I guess it is just the price of data integrity.

 

[gpsguy]

Just skip your Starbucks coffee for a day or two and you can pay the electric bill. [emoji3]


Sent from my phone

 

[Glorious1]

This topic is an old chestnut on these forums. Almost all the experts here (a group that does not include me) discourage drive standby for various reasons. Having studied it and experimented with it quite a bit (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?posts/166522/), I can tell you that even if you address the two issues that joeschmuck raises, you still may not get what you want.

I have a script that monitors and logs drive spin/standby status at intervals. I have two pools. One has no jails, no system dataset, no shares, and is only needed once per day, so I wanted it in standby the rest of the time. For a while, things worked well and the drives spun up once per day, then went back to standby. Then there was a FreeNAS update. Ever since then, the pattern has been chaotic and apparently random. Sometimes they spin up and down many times per day. Sometimes they stay spinning indefinitely. Often, the drives in the pool don't spin up and down together, but behave individually and erratically. With this behavior, I think the guys who say you're wearing the drive out by spinning it up and down all the time are probably right. So I gave up and just set them to spin 24/7.

I don't think the development community is interested in testing and making sure this will work, looking at and controlling all of the processes that might cause drives to spin up needlessly, because as I say, drive standby is not part of the FreeNAS culture.

 

[sremick]

My system only uses 40W idle. It's not worth the added wear-and-tear on the drives, nor the configuration hassle, to get them to spin down (especially considering the writes to the system dataset every 5 seconds). Not only would there be added cost for a separate system SSD drive (which would take a long time to recoup in the electricity savings), but earlier hard drive death would also incur added cost.

End of the story? Fool's errand, not worth it.