spin down spindles and jails

[Andy Holmes]

Hi there,

I've been playing with my freeNAS server since I installed it mid week. Ive created all the shares I need, everything is backed up included the freenas itself, so far so good.

Ive created several jails now, both plugins and not, and now im concerned that my disks wont spin down due to the OS's running from them. Hopefully soon ill place a mirrored SSD zpool that I can run my jails exclusively from, therefore the spinning drives should stop unless being accessed.

does this make sense please?

If so, im assuming I can simply shut down my jails and rsync the mount point holding my jails to the SSD when it arrives and restart them there? Probably over simplified I know ;)

 

[DrKK]

We get questions like this pretty much 2-3 times per week.

Why do you want the spinning drives to stop? Modern HDD's for NAS environments actually perform the best and have the best longevity if they are never spun down. Furthermore, by not spinning them down, you'll be "wasting" like two watts. Less, probably. Hell, spinning the drives UP after they've spun down is a whole order of magnitude more power during spin up than you would have had just letting them ride.

So the only thing that doesn't "make sense", really, is that you would want to do this in the first place.

And even if you disagree with me, you'll find (like a few thousand users before you) that it's almost impossible to get your FreeNAS drives to spin down in any case, because of the way things work in FreeNAS. You'll almost certainly have disk accesses for appliance-related reasons at intervals sufficiently frequent to make long term spin downs elusive, thus, greatly increasing your wear to the drives, and in fact, even possibly INCREASING the energy used, integrating over time.

I would recommend aborting mission on the spindown question.

 

[Andy Holmes]

erm, ok.... :(

I didn't realise that disks only take a few watts each, as a home user my freenas is only required to serve me a couple of hours per day so i thought it would make sense to do as much as i could from an environmental perspective that I could. Ill abandon my thinking then, along with the SSDs, saving my pockets and allowing me to afford the electricity bill :p

 

[DrKK]

erm, ok.... :(

I didn't realise that disks only take a few watts each, as a home user my freenas is only required to serve me a couple of hours per day so i thought it would make sense to do as much as i could from an environmental perspective that I could. Ill abandon my thinking then, along with the SSDs, saving my pockets and allowing me to afford the electricity bill :p

I think MOST of us only need our FreeNAS to serve us a couple hours per day.

I can't speak for everyone, but I would think any of the more prominent members of the community would agree with the following statements:

• It is difficult to even get the drives to spin down if you wanted to
• You don't want to
• Typical hard drive these days (especially 5400 RPM NAS drives) consumes a miniscule amount of power when idling
• The money you would "save" by spinning down is more than offset by the increased wear-and-tear to the hard drives
• The hard drives are DESIGNED to stay spinning

 

[DrKK]

Also, another data point, since you seem to care about this.

My FreeNAS consumes about 40W, on average. That's the WHOLE BOX. CPU, fans, network, IPMI, all the HDDs and SSD's. The whole thing. 40W. 24/7 all hard drives are spinning at full speed.

Really, by definition, it's already "green", and you can get your Democrat/hippie card.

 

[Bidule0hm]

In fact I don't use the NAS more than a few hours per day on average, but as I have all my documents on it when I need to access them I don't want to wait a few seconds just to browse the directories or open a doc... and it's a lot of shorts access so it'll need to spin-up the drives dozen of times per day...

So, yep, spin-down = useless in 99 % of the cases. The common rule is if you need to access the data more than once a day then don't spin-down the drives, you'll lose on the long term (wear on the drives + the PSU in fact (spin-up current is high...)) ;)

 

[Ericloewe]

I think MOST of us only need our FreeNAS to serve us a couple hours per day.

I can't speak for everyone, but I would think any of the more prominent members of the community would agree with the following statements:

• It is difficult to even get the drives to spin down if you wanted to
• You don't want to
• Typical hard drive these days (especially 5400 RPM NAS drives) consumes a miniscule amount of power when idling
• The money you would "save" by spinning down is more than offset by the increased wear-and-tear to the hard drives
• The hard drives are DESIGNED to stay spinning

I'm a prominent member of the community and I agree with this message.

Seriously, though. The environmental friendliness aspect is probably outweighed by the additional drives that need to be manufactured to replace the extra failures. Especially if power grids move away from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear, as the transport of the relatively heavy disks will still rely on fossil fuels.

 

[Andy Holmes]

I hear you, thank you all for your replies.