How spinning down disks affects life?

[FlangeMonkey]

Hi Guys,

I've been looking into spinning down my disks on idle and therefore also thinking of how this affects the life of the disks.

What are people’s thoughts on how spinning down your disks affects the life?

Thanks,

 

[m0nkey_]

Trying to spin down is pointless. Because of the nature of FreeNAS, your drives will not spin down for long, if at all. The .system dataset is typically on the first pool you create, where logs, statistics and config is stored.

If your disks are spinning up, then down again will add additional strain. There is also little gains when it comes to power consumption.

You're better off leaving them and make sure they have good cooling instead. This will enhance the overall lifespan of the drives.

 

[joeschmuck]

My drives have been running for over 4 years now and they do not spin down. The operation of spinning up a hard drive places a lot of stress on the motor electronics which can cause premature failures. @m0nkey_ is correct about the data being written too and if you did set your drives to spin down and they did, they would spin right back up and write data. You can get around that but only if you were to use FreeNAS once a week or less, and at that point you might as well just power the device off and save some power.

 

[Thumper33]

So even in a home network NAS where we might go a day or two without accessing any of the media, the NAS is busy enough looking through the data that it'll hardly ever be able to rest the drives? That doesn't make sense. I'm certainly not going to just power down the NAS when I go to sleep every night either. It should be smart enough to save power where it's reasonable to do so.

Sent from my SM-T377T using Tapatalk

 

[m0nkey_]

So even in a home network NAS where we might go a day or two without accessing any of the media, the NAS is busy enough looking through the data that it'll hardly ever be able to rest the drives? That doesn't make sense. I'm certainly not going to just power down the NAS when I go to sleep every night either. It should be smart enough to save power where it's reasonable to do so.

Sent from my SM-T377T using Tapatalk

I've had a few NAS now. Some real basic Netgear, some Synology and now FreeNAS. None of which were able to keep the drives spun down. There is always some kind of background operation, such as log writing, swap utilization, or whatever. Constant starting/stopping of the drives will put extra stain on the spindle.

Overall, nothing is gained by spinning down the drives, at most if you are successful, you'll save less than 50 cents/month by doing so.

 

[FlangeMonkey]

I'm sorry guys, but your wrong about the spin down. I was testing it yesterday and before I posted the question about life span. The drives can spin down for a considerable amount of time. FreeNAS can be configured for this however the architecture and hardware needs to be right.

The points behind why are somewhat mute because my reasons aren't down to cost but acoustics. This application is home NAS, the location is to the left of my desk and its as quite as it will be. All my noise is from the spinning disks. There also WD Reds but I'll have to post my WATT reading when I get a chance to check them, for anyone curious.

I was thinking of the extra wear, but I cannot find any studies on the matter. However could it be hours spinning vs power change?

 

[lmannyr]

I'm sorry guys, but your wrong about the spin down. I was testing it yesterday and before I posted the question about life span. The drives can spin down for a considerable amount of time. FreeNAS can be configured for this however the architecture and hardware needs to be right.

The points behind why are somewhat mute because my reasons aren't down to cost but acoustics. This application is home NAS, the location is to the left of my desk and its as quite as it will be. All my noise is from the spinning disks. There also WD Reds but I'll have to post my WATT reading when I get a chance to check them, for anyone curious.

I was thinking of the extra wear, but I cannot find any studies on the matter. However could it be hours spinning vs power change?

Interesting. I have had my FreeNAS box now for over a year. It holds 10 WD RED 4 TB drives. The ONLY time I hear the BOX, is in the afternoon when it's warmer inside my home. Otherwise, most times, the CPU/CASE fans are at minimal speed and is not noticeable at all. The case is very quiet. Sometimes I walk up to the BOX and make sure the power LED is lit. Its that quiet. Don't get me wrong, If I load the system up, it can get very loud with 3000RPM FANS. With a nice fan script, the fans are running only enough to keep the temps at what ever temp you want. With the CASE/CPU fans at minimum speed, I don't hear the HDD at all, not one bit.

 

[FlangeMonkey]

I run 6 WD Reds 4TB (I want an extra 2, but I need space elsewhere to rebuild the pool). My case is a Fractal R5 non-windowed. It was built to be silent and without the disks you cannot hear the box, even at full tilt CPU wise it’s still silent. With the disks it’s still quiet but I hear the disks rotating (probably pitch or vibration), maybe a different case would be better, but it’s just the trade-off with the bays. Either way, it’s good enough at sub 20db from a crappy phone app (I need to find my meter to test this properly, so take that with a pinch of salt). I myself am sensitive to pitch, I hear coil wine more than most people and I'd like to further improve things by making it properly silent like it is without the disks spinning.

On the life span front, I’m still interested in opinions, but I feel the general census is keep them spinning to reduce the wear on spin-ups. I think I might optimize spin down for testing and see how much down-time there is. I could see 24 hours at times between snapshots and usage, but who knows until I test it in that configuration with proper monitoring. I think in situations like that there could be less wear on the disks, but like I say I see no studies on the matter.

Thanks,

 

[joeschmuck]

So even in a home network NAS where we might go a day or two without accessing any of the media, the NAS is busy enough looking through the data that it'll hardly ever be able to rest the drives? That doesn't make sense. I'm certainly not going to just power down the NAS when I go to sleep every night either. It should be smart enough to save power where it's reasonable to do so.

Sent from my SM-T377T using Tapatalk

As I previously indicated, you can setup a system where the drives would sleep but you would need to set it up correctly.

While spinning the drives down will save you a little bit of power, it's not much at all unless you have a lot of hard drives. Some people here have 18+ hard drives and in that situation, if the drives are only for storing data that is infrequently accessed, you could sleep the drives and gain a little power savings BUT if you are like the common home user with 4 to 8 hard drives, you will find out that the savings is minimal and you risk your drive failing sooner. The cost of a single hard drive out weighs the savings in power. You might be a bit suprised to find out that most of your power in a FreeNAS (or any computer) system is the motherboard, unless you have a lot of hard drives as previously indicated.

If you are looking for a system which consumes very low current then you should be looking for some other solution becasue a full blown computer based system is not your system, however if you are looking for comercial grade throughput at a great price then FreeNAS is the product.

 

[joeschmuck]

I run 6 WD Reds 4TB (I want an extra 2, but I need space elsewhere to rebuild the pool). My case is a Fractal R5 non-windowed. It was built to be silent and without the disks you cannot hear the box, even at full tilt CPU wise it’s still silent. With the disks it’s still quiet but I hear the disks rotating (probably pitch or vibration), maybe a different case would be better, but it’s just the trade-off with the bays. Either way, it’s good enough at sub 20db from a crappy phone app (I need to find my meter to test this properly, so take that with a pinch of salt). I myself am sensitive to pitch, I hear coil wine more than most people and I'd like to further improve things by making it properly silent like it is without the disks spinning.

On the life span front, I’m still interested in opinions, but I feel the general census is keep them spinning to reduce the wear on spin-ups. I think I might optimize spin down for testing and see how much down-time there is. I could see 24 hours at times between snapshots and usage, but who knows until I test it in that configuration with proper monitoring. I think in situations like that there could be less wear on the disks, but like I say I see no studies on the matter.

Thanks,

As you said it's likely the mouting or case of the hard drives, but then again you might have a drive or two going bad. My drives were ultra quiet when I first got them, now I can hear them (with my ear next to the drives) but it's very difficult to do so with the side panel off. With the side panel on, you can't hear a thing, and my case has a lot of holes in it so it's not a sinencing case, it's just very solid construction.

When you do your tests you should monitor power consumption and probably monitor it for at least a week. Also don't forget to figure out what would power the hard drives back up. Some of us are trying to ensure that SMART tests are setup by default and I run a short SMART test every day and a long SMART test once a week. Then you have other tasks running in the background. Monitor the head loading count and start count.

 

[FlangeMonkey]

As I previously indicated, you can setup a system where the drives would sleep but you would need to set it up correctly.

While spinning the drives down will save you a little bit of power, it's not much at all unless you have a lot of hard drives. Some people here have 18+ hard drives and in that situation, if the drives are only for storing data that is infrequently accessed, you could sleep the drives and gain a little power savings BUT if you are like the common home user with 4 to 8 hard drives, you will find out that the savings is minimal and you risk your drive failing sooner. The cost of a single hard drive out weighs the savings in power. You might be a bit suprised to find out that most of your power in a FreeNAS (or any computer) system is the motherboard, unless you have a lot of hard drives as previously indicated.

If you are looking for a system which consumes very low current then you should be looking for some other solution becasue a full blown computer based system is not your system, however if you are looking for comercial grade throughput at a great price then FreeNAS is the product.

Dude! Let me further clarify, I do not care about the cost savings or power, I care about the acoustics.

The question is related to life span not power savings.

 

[joeschmuck]

Dude! Let me further clarify, I do not care about the cost savings or power, I care about the acoustics.

The question is related to life span not power savings.

Okay.

 

[m0nkey_]

Right, so you ask

Dude! Let me further clarify, I do not care about the cost savings or power, I care about the acoustics.

The question is related to life span not power savings.

Use SSDs then :D

 

[FlangeMonkey]

Right, so you ask

Use SSDs then :D

Oh yeah lol...

 

[FlangeMonkey]

So, in that case how do you think spin down will affect the life span of SSD!