Hi ! I just started using OMV and I'm loving it. Although, I'm wondering what I can do to preserve my WD blue 6Tb HDD's health--- since it's not a datacentre drive and can't/shouldn't run 24/7 sustainably.
I thought of power management, but didn't know if that would fix much. Let me know what you guys think! I can't seem to find a feature to spin down the disks when not used/accessed.
Power management is more about saving power costs than preserving hard drives and there are caveats. As it is with any electric motor, hard drives experience the most stress as they're spinning up. Also, during spin up, current (as in electric use) is highest. This can be detrimental to longevity. In some cases, when drive idle states are used, if they spin up a lot, they can actually use more power than just letting them free wheel.
I've been using commodity (consumer drives) 24x7 for years without issues. Enterprise drives, generally, have a higher spindle speed so they have higher transfer rates and they have bits of code, in their controllers, to optimize them for speed and continuous use. Do enterprise drives last longer (compared to commodity drives) when they're completely hammered 24x7? That's not certain. What is certain is Back Blaze (a data backup company) decided long ago to use commodity drives due to the cost savings.
In the bottom line, if you're not worried about your power bill, your drive will be fine and last a long time without power management. (But as it is with all things, nothing is guaranteed.)
I thought of power management, but didn't know if that would fix much. Let me know what you guys think! I can't seem to find a feature to spin down the disks when not used/accessed.
Spinning down the disks is not a good practice, if the drives keep spinning down and up. When I purchased my seconde hand SAS drives, they had only 20 startups in 7 years. And they never reached a high temperature. They never spinned up and down.
The best IMHO is to keep the disk drive running 24/24 at low temperature.
This will prolonge the life of your disk to a maximum.
Install the main OMV system on SSD/NVME, possibly in RAID1 with btrfs, to reduce disk access to your array.
Of course you can limit the number of writes (I think of logging) and/or use RAMFS if needed.
If you are using ZFS, arc keeps all data in memory and limits the number of reads/writes.
Think of data safety:
This can be detrimental to longevity. In some cases, when drive idle states are used, if they spin up a lot, they can actually use more power than just letting them free wheel.
I've been using commodity (consumer drives) 24x7 for years without issues. Enterprise drives, generally, have a higher spindle speed so they have higher transfer rates and they have bits of code, in their controllers, to optimize them for speed and continuous use. Do enterprise drives last longer (compared to commodity drives) when they're completely hammered 24x7? That's not certain.
Thank you for this awesome feedback ! I shut off most power on/off settings that I had set up.
Think of data safety:
- using a good file system with snapshots is a good practice.
- Making backups is always needed.
- I recommend installing Scrutiny using Docker (there is a tutorial on the forum) to monitor disk heath (receive an email in case of bad block). Run short smart test everyday and a long smart test every three months (you may not run all long tests the same day).
And for this too ! The VM itself is stored on my SSD, via proxmox, and am buying an HDD for backups ASAP.
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