HDD spindown blocked

1st Official Post

    Hi. I have problems keeping my HDDs in standby mode. Since my NAS sits in my living room it is very annoying to here the hdds spinning and working.
    The good thing: I know the services that keep the HDDs online. the bad thing: I don't know how to fix them.
    So there are two services I identified to be problematic: Gitlab (docker) and Nextcloud (no docker). I moved all gitlab docker volumes except the data volume (/var/opt/gitlab) to my system drive that is a SSD and for nextcloud I only have the data folder on the HDDs, too. For docker it worked moving ALL volumes to SSD (I did for Pi-hole), but I want the gitlab data to remain on HDDs. For nextcloud the problematic process seems to be php-fpm what shows up in iotop.
    Does someone has an idea how to fix it or had a similar problem? If you need more informations about my setup let me know...


    EDIT: I also have the strange behaviour, that the HDDs spin down immediately after I stoped the problematic processes. I set APM to 127 and spindown to 30 min. For debugging the problem this is nice, but I think not very healthy for the drives...

    • Official Post

    Nobody needs any more information about your setup. We can simply ignore your post. We don't have any problem.


    If you want help or suggestions YOU need to give more information. The more information you give the more likely you are to get relevant help and suggestions.

    • Official Post

    I was trying to get you to provide more information. Not because I needed more information but because you needed to provide more information in order to get relevant help from me or others.


    But I will ignore you from now on.

    If you care about drive health you should never spin them down. Letting them run 24x7x365 puts less stress on them than spinning up and down.


    Alternatively, switch to SSDs, relocate server, or buy some earplugs.

    Hi @jollyrogr. Thanks for your answer :)


    Its not only the spinning of the disk, there is also permanent (hearable) access on them, what prevents them from spinning down.
    SSD are to expensive for me (even though they got a lot cheaper), relocation is difficult for my small apartment (living room is better than sleeping room), so earplugs would be the best solution against the noise..


    But Im still worried about the permanent access on the disks:
    iostat shows a recuring write access on the HDDs (its RAID-Z with sdc, sdd and sdf):

    Code
    Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
sda               0,00         0,00         0,00          0          0
sdb               0,00         0,00         0,00          0          0
sdc              21,50         0,00       270,00          0        540
sdd              23,00         0,00       258,00          0        516
sde              20,00         0,00       272,00          0        544

    The raid-z doesn't help you. With the data being striped across the disks, they all need to spin up for any data to be written or read.


    If you used a JBOD configuration with something like Snapraid, unused drives could be allowed to spin down.

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