I've been dealing with some HDD bug-a-boos. I built a new home server. The old one, Celeron G1610 based finally got retired. I hadn't realized it until very recently after I already decided to replace it, that the RAID array was never spinning down. So my two Seagate 7200rpm 3TB drives. From some research, and partly I know when the server was newer, the drives did spin down, Intel changed something in their RAID drivers to prevent spin-down. The whole sucker used to use about 20w at idle and 35w with the drives spinning. About 38w stream video as an iTunes server. So, this was kind of less than ideal (60GB SSD boot drive).
New server is on an Asrock B450 mITX/Gigabyte B450 uATX board with an Athlon 300GE Pro. A pair of WD red pro 5400rpm drives. I built it first with that Gigabyte board, and then swapped to the Asrock board last night. Just trying to get the power down further. It didn't do much, but I haven't finished tinkering. The Gigabyte board was 31w Streaming video via itunes, 29w drives idle. 22w drives spun down. And they WILL spin down, but only using Windows soft, or as individual drives. AMD RAID driver prevents them from sleeping if using the hardware RAID in the chipset. Okay, well turns out Windows soft RAID works fine. The Asrock board has pushed power down to 26-27w streaming video, 25w idle, 19.5w with the drives spun down. Except they will NOT spin down even over very long idle. Yes, I've set the spin down time to 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes. Nada. I've also done other things like turn drive indexing off, looked a PROCMON, etc. and I don't see anything accessing the drives and keeping them awake. What the heck could be keeping them spun up? I can use a tool to force them to spin down, HDDScan. Works fine. I can even put together a batch file to use the tool to spin them down, and I'd imagine I could set it on a schedule to spin the drives down. Only a bit annoying if in the middle of a file transfer, as it'll lag the transfer for maybe 5-10 seconds as the drives spin down, and then spin right back up. Considering the rating of over 100k cycles for the drive, I am not too worried about setting an hourly task to park the heads. I sleep the server from 12:30am till 7:30am every day. So that is only ~4500 cycles a year. Even if I kept the drives for 10 years, that isn't even half their rated parking cycles. I am HOPING that in 2-3 years, I can finally replace spinning rust with SSDs. I almost did with this build, but for 8TB of SSD storage, using 4x2TB of inexpensive SSDs would still have been $450-500 versus $150. Prices keep coming down on storage faster than my storage needs increase. Maybe 350GB a year are my storage needs going up, and I still had 1.3TiB free on my 2x3TB array. So from 5.4TiB formatted to 7.2TiB formatted gets me about 3.4TiB of free space. I don't like dipping below 20% free space because performance starts seriously dropping off. So really about 2TiB of usable space and 1.4TiB of buffer. Call it 5 years before storage is an issue.
So, sorry. Back to the real topic. Anyone have any earthly idea how to get the drives to spin down via OS, rather than a tool? It would be nice to just let the drive firmware manage this, but it seems like now it won't. HDD Scan has a setting to set the HDD firmware timeout time. It will allow me to set it, and if the drive is spun down, it spins the drive up. I assume because its sending a command to the drive firmware, so of course the drive wakes up. But then the drive doesn't spin down on its own later...
Need to reinstall AMD RAID drivers because it includes storage/SATA drivers? Refresh my win 11 install to make sure there isn't something hanging in there from the Gigabyte setup? I simply swapped all of the hardware on to the Asrock board (yes, I did reinstall the AMD chipset drivers). Is there a way to actually get to the WD firmware settings? WD have a tool? HDD Scan showed several drive options as unavailable. I assume because it can't properly access all firmware settings on these specific drives.
New server is on an Asrock B450 mITX/Gigabyte B450 uATX board with an Athlon 300GE Pro. A pair of WD red pro 5400rpm drives. I built it first with that Gigabyte board, and then swapped to the Asrock board last night. Just trying to get the power down further. It didn't do much, but I haven't finished tinkering. The Gigabyte board was 31w Streaming video via itunes, 29w drives idle. 22w drives spun down. And they WILL spin down, but only using Windows soft, or as individual drives. AMD RAID driver prevents them from sleeping if using the hardware RAID in the chipset. Okay, well turns out Windows soft RAID works fine. The Asrock board has pushed power down to 26-27w streaming video, 25w idle, 19.5w with the drives spun down. Except they will NOT spin down even over very long idle. Yes, I've set the spin down time to 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes. Nada. I've also done other things like turn drive indexing off, looked a PROCMON, etc. and I don't see anything accessing the drives and keeping them awake. What the heck could be keeping them spun up? I can use a tool to force them to spin down, HDDScan. Works fine. I can even put together a batch file to use the tool to spin them down, and I'd imagine I could set it on a schedule to spin the drives down. Only a bit annoying if in the middle of a file transfer, as it'll lag the transfer for maybe 5-10 seconds as the drives spin down, and then spin right back up. Considering the rating of over 100k cycles for the drive, I am not too worried about setting an hourly task to park the heads. I sleep the server from 12:30am till 7:30am every day. So that is only ~4500 cycles a year. Even if I kept the drives for 10 years, that isn't even half their rated parking cycles. I am HOPING that in 2-3 years, I can finally replace spinning rust with SSDs. I almost did with this build, but for 8TB of SSD storage, using 4x2TB of inexpensive SSDs would still have been $450-500 versus $150. Prices keep coming down on storage faster than my storage needs increase. Maybe 350GB a year are my storage needs going up, and I still had 1.3TiB free on my 2x3TB array. So from 5.4TiB formatted to 7.2TiB formatted gets me about 3.4TiB of free space. I don't like dipping below 20% free space because performance starts seriously dropping off. So really about 2TiB of usable space and 1.4TiB of buffer. Call it 5 years before storage is an issue.
So, sorry. Back to the real topic. Anyone have any earthly idea how to get the drives to spin down via OS, rather than a tool? It would be nice to just let the drive firmware manage this, but it seems like now it won't. HDD Scan has a setting to set the HDD firmware timeout time. It will allow me to set it, and if the drive is spun down, it spins the drive up. I assume because its sending a command to the drive firmware, so of course the drive wakes up. But then the drive doesn't spin down on its own later...
Need to reinstall AMD RAID drivers because it includes storage/SATA drivers? Refresh my win 11 install to make sure there isn't something hanging in there from the Gigabyte setup? I simply swapped all of the hardware on to the Asrock board (yes, I did reinstall the AMD chipset drivers). Is there a way to actually get to the WD firmware settings? WD have a tool? HDD Scan showed several drive options as unavailable. I assume because it can't properly access all firmware settings on these specific drives.