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Thread: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

  1. #1
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    Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    Hi, I just installed a fresh version of 12.04 server and have everything configured. When i set the spin down settings on hdparm.conf everything appeared to go fine. However, when i checked the status of the drives later, it appears that 2 of my drives (bot seagate barracudas) spun down successfully while 2 drives (both WD caviar blacks) didn't. I can spin them down using hdparm -y, but not using the normal -S switch.

    Also, I read that you may need to use -B, but when i tried it, i got the following:

    setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254)
    HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error
    setting standby to 1 (5 seconds)
    APM_level = not supported


    There is nothing touching the drives, and I followed this link to make sure SMART wasn't interrupting the process. http://zackreed.me/articles/60-spin-...dle-hard-disks

  2. #2
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    drives don't support advanced power management. as a result, the -S flag won't work
    Don't waste your energy trying to change opinions ... Do your thing, and don't care if they like it.

  3. #3
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    Quote Originally Posted by sandyd View Post
    drives don't support advanced power management. as a result, the -S flag won't work
    +1. The disks won't spin down if they don't support advanced power management. I have added a note to my tutorial to explain this limitation to future viewers. One option could be to roll a script that uses iostat using a tempfile to track disk activity over time, and then spin it down with the -y option once that threshold has been reached.
    Last edited by rubylaser; August 31st, 2012 at 01:23 PM.

  4. #4
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    Quote Originally Posted by sandyd View Post
    drives don't support advanced power management. as a result, the -S flag won't work
    So there aren't any packages that will monitor disk usage and spin down the disks after inactivity like hdparm does? Just surprised that "relatively" new drives like these wouldn't support this kind of power management. I mistakenly thought that all modern drives had this capability as long as they had SMART

  5. #5
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    What model are the WD drives and how are they connected to the computer (motherboard SATA head, PCI / PCIe card, USB, ESATA, etc)?

  6. #6
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    Quote Originally Posted by rubylaser View Post
    What model are the WD drives and how are they connected to the computer (motherboard SATA head, PCI / PCIe card, USB, ESATA, etc)?

    The drives that won't spin down are WD Caviar Black 1 TB (WD1001FALS) drives. They are connected via the SATA header on the motherboard, as are the other two drives that do spin down.
    Last edited by jickerson; September 1st, 2012 at 04:28 AM.

  7. #7
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    Hi,

    I purchased several wb 2Tb green drives some time ago for a Backup array on my main server. Even though all the drives where the same model, 2 of them didn't power down.

    After several emails with wd support they recommended I update the firmware, and since then all the drives power down when idle.

    So maybe a firmware update might work for you.

    Regards
    Ian Dobson
    Walking on water and writing software to specification is easy if they're frozen.

    My corner of the internet http://www.planet-ian.com

  8. #8
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    Quote Originally Posted by rubylaser View Post
    +1. The disks won't spin down if they don't support advanced power management. I have added a note to my tutorial to explain this limitation to future viewers. One option could be to roll a script that uses iostat using a tempfile to track disk activity over time, and then spin it down with the -y option once that threshold has been reached.

    I had an idea on a script that might do the trick, but wanted to bounce it off of you guys before i learned enough to actually write the script (I know python, but my linux skills are next to nothing).

    Leveraging the fact that two of the drives do follow the -S flag of hdparm and spin down as expected, while the other two can be spun down using the -y flag, can i write a script that simply does a check of the well-behaved drives using hdparm -C periodically (every 10 minutes or so) and if it reports that the drives are inactive then it executes hdparm with the -y flag on the other two drive. Will checking the status of the drives reset their spin-down clock? Is there any other reason why doing so would not be advisable?

    Thanks!

  9. #9
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    I would check as ian dobson mentioned for a firmware update, because that could allow the disks to spin down with the -S flag. If there is no firmware update, then you could use the -C flag as that won't wake your disks up from being spun down. If a firmware update can fix this for you, that's by far the easiest and most reliable way to make this happen.

    What is the Make and Model number of your 2 hard drives that won't spin down?

  10. #10
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    Re: Half the drives in my RAID won't spin down

    Sorry it took so long to respond. The drives are Western Digital Caviar Blacks, WD1001FALS-00J7B0. I've been digging around, and have become a little worried that I'll need windows to update the firmware. The problem is that i don't have a windows machine with SATA and i don't think it is going to let me flash the firmware if the drives are connected to an external usb enclosure.

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