I have a huge amount of data. Some is not important at all (like TV recordings), other is vital. All my important data is on a Raid 5 - with a cyclic backup job to an external hard drive.
I do care about energy consumption, so I installed the autoshutdown plugin and set a spindown time for all physical hard drives, except the system drive, which is a NAND stick.
Currently my NAS has 3 WD Red harddrives configured as Raid 5. Now I'm thinking about moving another hard drive (3 TB WD red, from Nix-based DVB receiver) to the NAS.
So I could either expand my Raid 5 (gaining overall performance) OR I could use the new drive as a separate volume.
Now to my question: Will spin-down work on a per volume basis? Will my Raid 5 go to sleep if I place my recordings on a non-raid disk and no shares on the raid are being used at that moment? Or is spin-down handled on system basis? My primary concern is wear of raid disks.
thx for any help,
Thomas