HDD Standby problems

[wijnandschouten]

Hello,

We have been using Truenas for a while now on different configurations. Mostly with 36 drive Supermicro chassis machines and 16 / 18 TB drives.
As electricity prices are on the rise i watched the power usage of these machines and this is extreme high ( Up to 400 watt baseload , 600 watt peak ).
Up till now we only use Truenas core 12.

Today i did a little test with a machine and put Ubuntu 22 on one it. The power went from 400 to 200 watts so i figured to do more testing.
I installed Truenas Scale ( As it's Linux based ) on the machine and we went instantly back to 400 watts.... That's a surprise , i hoped to stay on the 200 :(

I put the governor on powersave for the machine, so this can't be it i guess. NFS is still disabled so there are no writes or IO to the pool.
I enabled APM to 1 and a spindown of 5 minutes , but still no avail.

Upon checking i discovered that :


root@truenas[~]# hdparm -C /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
drive state is: active/idle
root@truenas[~]#

The drives do not spin down at all.

Doing a :
root@truenas[~]# hdparm -y /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
issuing standby command

Leads to a standby of 3 seconds at most ... then it comes back to active again.

Any idea on what the problem might be here?

>>


root@truenas[~]# hdparm -I /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WUH721818ALE6L4
Serial Number: 3RJ368MA
Firmware Revision: PCGNW232
Transport: Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6, SATA Rev 3.0; Revision: ATA8-AST T13 Project D1697 Revision 0b
Standards:
Used: unknown (minor revision code 0x009c)
Supported: 11 10 9 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 11
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 35156656128
Logical Sector size: 512 bytes [ Supported: 2048 256 ]
Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes
Logical Sector-0 offset: 0 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 17166336 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 18000207 MBytes (18000 GB)
cache/buffer size = unknown
Form Factor: 3.5 inch
Nominal Media Rotation Rate: 7200
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Queue depth: 32
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, no device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 0
Advanced power management level: 1
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_BUFFER command
* NOP cmd
* DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
Advanced Power Management feature set
Power-Up In Standby feature set
* SET_FEATURES required to spinup after power up
SET_MAX security extension
* 48-bit Address feature set
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
* FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
* SMART error logging
* SMART self-test
* Media Card Pass-Through
* General Purpose Logging feature set
* WRITE_{DMA|MULTIPLE}_FUA_EXT
* 64-bit World wide name
* URG for READ_STREAM[_DMA]_EXT
* URG for WRITE_STREAM[_DMA]_EXT
* WRITE_UNCORRECTABLE_EXT command
* {READ,WRITE}_DMA_EXT_GPL commands
* Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* unknown 119[6]
unknown 119[7]
* Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
* Gen3 signaling speed (6.0Gb/s)
* Native Command Queueing (NCQ)
* Host-initiated interface power management
* Phy event counters
* NCQ priority information
* READ_LOG_DMA_EXT equivalent to READ_LOG_EXT
* DMA Setup Auto-Activate optimization
Device-initiated interface power management
In-order data delivery
* Software settings preservation
unknown 78[7]
unknown 78[10]
unknown 78[11]
* SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
* SCT Write Same (AC2)
* SCT Error Recovery Control (AC3)
* SCT Features Control (AC4)
* SCT Data Tables (AC5)
* SANITIZE feature set
* OVERWRITE_EXT command
* Extended number of user addressable sectors
* DOWNLOAD MICROCODE DMA command
* WRITE BUFFER DMA command
* READ BUFFER DMA command

<snip>

 

[da-anda]

if /dev/sda is part of your boot pool, then it won't spin down as the boot pool is constantly written to (log files etc). But other than that, discs should spin down, they at least do for me

 

[ChrisRJ]

Is your problem about HDD spin-down or the power consumption when the server is idle?