Suspend / sleep in FreeNAS 11

[validom]

hi,

I just found a thread from 2yrs ago, the idea of suspend / sleep was simply rejected in there. I added a comment in there but it seems to be an old area of the forum. Can't believe it is still true. Any comments?

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/suspend-or-sleep-mode.45541/

Vali

 

[kdragon75]

To quote the same thread...

The question, sort of, doesn't make sense. But, let's ignore that, and just answer it.

No. I don't think so. NAS's with modern components are either in enterprises (in which case you don't power down), or in home deployments, which means you are almost always under 100 or 150Watts, and very frequently, you are under 50 watts (I am at about 30 watts). So there is not much electricity savings to be had. Furthermore, sleeping/powering down drives causes a lot of wear and tear---you save (literally) 2 cents of electricity, but you put 4 cents of wear-and-tear on your drive, so you actually lose. Most of us don't even recommend SPINNING DOWN the drives while the system is powered on!

So, no, I wouldn't expect anything like you say. Simply because it's a bad idea.

Perhaps you would like to offer a compelling use case?

 

[DrKK]

To quote the same thread...

Perhaps you would like to offer a compelling use case?

Who, me? Or Validom?

 

[DrKK]

Just for the record, these guys in Germany are paying horrific rates for electricity. 3 times, I believe, what we pay in North America, if not more. That means they can be spending over $1 per day for the electricity to run their NASses, if they have big ones. That may change the various calculi, I don't know.

 

[anmnz]

the idea of suspend / sleep was simply rejected in there

Perhaps it would be a good idea to raise a feature request with the FreeNAS developers, at bugs.freenas.org, including the excellent detail you've provided (in your post in that older thread) on your calculated cost savings.

 

[user.0]

I have a Freenas box with 5 HDDs for raid plus 1 HDD for the system dataset. My power consumption is 60 Watt. In Germany I pay 0.33 € / Kwh. This makes 0.48 € / day or 14 € / month or 168 € / year. For that money I can buy two new HDDs each year. The failure rate from powering down the drives will never get so high.
For enterprise users this is not a problem, but enterprise charges their customers 1000 € / project day and pays its IT-workers 100 €/ project day, so they can afford it. For home users it is a huge waste. I managed to get the drives spun down after 30 mins of inactivity and then I go down to 40 Watt, which is still too much.
I could even power down the box and wake it with WOL, but unfortunately it takes 3 minutes to boot from the USB stick, so this is also not a solution.
Actually suspend to ram works in Freenas 9 (the power-led blinks) but resume does not work - the system never recovers from sleep.
This is obviously the most important feature for home users in Western Europe.

 

[kdragon75]

I could even power down the box and wake it with WOL, but unfortunately it takes 3 minutes to boot from the USB stick, so this is also not a solution.

So you want to have your cake and eat it too?

This is obviously the most important feature for home users in Western Europe.

So now you speak for all of Western Europe?
FreeNAS was never built to be a low power system. If you power constraints are that high, get a two bay synology or build a system with a low power atom CPU and low power memory. Or does that hardware cost too much? You get to a point where the cost of build a fast low power system will cost more than the power you will save over the life of the system. If you got down to 40watts, that's darn good! I have seen nightlights that use that much! Do you have LED light in all of your lamps? Perhaps you can offset your NAS power consumption elsewhere in you home?

 

[user.0]

So you want to have your cake and eat it too?

So now you speak for all of Western Europe?
FreeNAS was never built to be a low power system. If you power constraints are that high, get a two bay synology or build a system with a low power atom CPU and low power memory. Or does that hardware cost too much? You get to a point where the cost of build a fast low power system will cost more than the power you will save over the life of the system. If you got down to 40watts, that's darn good! I have seen nightlights that use that much! Do you have LED light in all of your lamps? Perhaps you can offset your NAS power consumption elsewhere in you home?

I moved from a two bay synology to Freenas because of transfer speed. With the former I get 10 Mb/s write speed and with Freenas 60 Mb/s. It is not the cost that I cannot afford, it is the extreme wastefulness that I am not accustomed to. It doesn't matter how powerful a system is. If it is going to stay idle for a long time it shouldn't burn the same amount of energy. What if car manifacturers sold you a car where you cannot power down the engine when you are parked. If it didn't fit your needs you could get a bicycle (the low powered system in your example). Nobody would buy such a car. Anyway I am not paying anything for Freenas, so developers are free to choose what to care about and what to turn a blind eye on. But you wanted a use case and you were given one and now you are trying to ridicule it.
All my techie friends with whom I can talk about such matters are stunned about 40 Watt idle and no one would ever consider such a scenario. It is just a very different perception here. Yes i generalized about Western Europe because I don't believe that electricity is cheaper in the UK,France, Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. I would be glad to hear opinions from people from these countries.

 

[kdragon75]

You need to think of waste over the entire life cycle of a product. What uses more energy, manufacturing & shipping new components or using something that has already sunk that energy cost. Reduce REUSE and recycle.

What if car manifacturers sold you a car where you cannot power down the engine when you are parked.

That all depends on energy use to run the car at idle vs building a new car and disposing of the old one. Again you have to think in terms of the entire product lifecycle.

 

[anmnz]

Yes i generalized about Western Europe because I don't believe that electricity is cheaper in the UK,France, Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.

I suggest you try a little research. You will be surprised to find how wildly wrong this is. Average electricity prices in Germany are *a lot* higher than UK / France / the Netherlands.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Geopolitical issues aside, the simplest answer I can give @user.0 is to continue using Wake-on-LAN (or scheduled power-on in BIOS) but to replace the boot media with a small, inexpensive SSD - that would likely make the boot speed much more tolerable.