Long idle-time until transfer is starting

[MiBe]

Hi,

i finished building my FreeNAS 8 and filled it with data. I get a CIFS/Samba transfer rate around 70Mb/s.
But if I'm going to stream a movie to my HTPC it needs a very long time (over 30s) to get started.
So I'm looking for the problem and noticed, FreeNAS needs about 30s to start a transfer to another pc but then runs quite fast!

I'm using Raid-Z1 with 3*2TB (Samsung Spinpoint EcoGreen) and a Core i5 with 8GB RAM.
Referring to reports none of the hardware reaches its limit. There are a few other drives but not on the ZFS-Array.

Where is the problem?
Thank you!

 

[MiBe]

Anyone an idea?

Is it a problem wth my onboard-nic?

 

[johnnyq]

This is due to the power management of the hardDrive itself, if its inactive for more than 30 secs it halts to save on energy, so it takes 20 to 30 secs to spin back up. This is not a FreeNAS issue and this feature cannot be reconfigured in freenas, this has to do with the firmware of the drive. I know Western Digital Green Drives do this although i think they are set to 8secs of inactivity. I have the Wester digital green and downloaded a firmware modify utility to turn the feature off, now it works great for me. Hope this helps

 

[Brand]

I have the Wester digital green and downloaded a firmware modify utility to turn the feature off, now it works great for me.

I would think that modifying the firmware to perform outside of the manufactures specifications could possibly lead to them not honoring the warranty.

 

[MiBe]

Thanks for your replies.

I don't think its about the power management, cause it seems to work fine now (for the moment - had this before and it stopped again).
Is it possible it depends on the free space on the zfs-raid?
When I used the whole disk space it was very slow. Now I copied my files around and noticed it works.

 

[janptak]

In my freenas I use only WD Greendrives (1Tbytes model) and I dont encounter such behaviour. I have powerdeamon enabled but I dont use spindown feature for drives - they are always on.
All transfers start immediatelly.