Should Mechanical drives be turned off automatically by the system on a NAS?

[happymax1212]

I'm using Windows Server 2012 R2 as the NAS OS, and Windows tend to turn off the drives while idle and bringing them back online is quite noisy. I currently disabled that functionality. I heard that frequent start and stop of mechanical drives may damage the drive, so should I let Windows turn off those drives automatically? I'm using both Seagate Barracuda and Ironwolf drives. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

It won't necessarily damage them, but it may cause increased wear and tear. However, I'm sure the increase is more or less negligible given the drives you have.

[AshleyAshes]

Some people make guesses that spinning up a drive puts the most wear on a drive but I've gone looking and I've found ZERO meaningful testing or information that would prove this.  Drive spindown has been a normal feature on CPs for quite some time and there have been no mass reports of it killing systems.

 

One thing you CAN be sure of is that spinning drives consumes power.  My NAS uses FlexRAID which allows each drive to spin down as needed rather than all or none, and I can say that it's wattage goes from about 125w with all drives spinning to 65w with anywhere from 0 to 2 drives spinning.  I'll take that power savings for a box that just sits and downloads stuff all day.

[happymax1212]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

It won't necessarily damage them, but it may cause increased wear and tear. However, I'm sure the increase is more or less negligible given the drives you have.

So I can safely enable that option and save some electricity bill ? I'm quite worried about the temperature of the drives ever since I disabled that functionality. They stay at around 37 degrees Centigrade. 

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 minutes ago, happymax1212 said:

So I can safely enable that option and save some electricity bill ? I'm quite worried about the temperature of the drives ever since I disabled that functionality. They stay at around 37 degrees Centigrade.

Sure, though I don't think you'll be saving much unless your rates are really high. As far as temperatures go, 37C is fine. In some sense, a warm drive is a bit better on the mechanics because the lubricant needs to be warm to function properly. I'd only worry if it starts peaking above 50C and it's not doing a sustained operation.

[happymax1212]

4 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Some people make guesses that spinning up a drive puts the most wear on a drive but I've gone looking and I've found ZERO meaningful testing or information that would prove this.  Drive spindown has been a normal feature on CPs for quite some time and there have been no mass reports of it killing systems.

 

One thing you CAN be sure of is that spinning drives consumes power.  My NAS uses FlexRAID which allows each drive to spin down as needed rather than all or none, and I can say that it's wattage goes from about 125w with all drives spinning to 65w with anywhere from 0 to 2 drives spinning.  I'll take that power savings for a box that just sits and downloads stuff all day.

Thanks, then I'll certainly enable that. 

[dcgreen2k]

28 minutes ago, happymax1212 said:

So I can safely enable that option and save some electricity bill ? I'm quite worried about the temperature of the drives ever since I disabled that functionality. They stay at around 37 degrees Centigrade. 

 

I try to keep my drives somewhere between 30-40C. When doing very long sustained writes, a small case fan blowing onto the drives can decrease temps by 10-15C.

[happymax1212]

3 minutes ago, RandomGuy13 said:

The only reason why you might want to disable it is if it was too aggressive and keeps powering up and powering down the drives. If its a NAS that you might only use a couple times a day then unfortunately enable it. You should be able to tweak the power settings so that you adjust the time it waits before powering down. Even if it's a business server that might be used all day. I think we had our servers power down after 30 mins of inactivity so that they turn off over night. 

 

It realy does help reduce wear on the drive, otherwise it would be spinning all day and all night. 

It did power up before even though nobody was connected at the time. Might be an anti-virus software problem. 

[seagate_surfer]

You've got two different drive types, the IronWolf, which is meant for NAS and to be running 24/7, and the BarraCuda, which is not meant for NAS and meant to run up to 8 hours a day x 5 days a week. So it's actually good for the BarraCuda to spin down when not being utilized, because that is how it's firmware is designed to work, but it can cause NAS drives to wear down quicker, because their firmware is designed to always keep the drive spinning.

We always advocate two big rules:
1. Use any drive for the purpose it was engineered for.
2. Always back up your data.

[leadeater]

Long term it's better to keep the HDD spinning rather than starting and stopping it frequently, that puts the most stress on the motor. It's common for a server that has been running for 5+ years that if it's shut down some of the HDDs will instantly fail once you turn it back on.

[happymax1212]

8 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

You've got two different drive types, the IronWolf, which is meant for NAS and to be running 24/7, and the BarraCuda, which is not meant for NAS and meant to run up to 8 hours a day x 5 days a week. So it's actually good for the BarraCuda to spin down when not being utilized, because that is how it's firmware is designed to work, but it can cause NAS drives to wear down quicker, because their firmware is designed to always keep the drive spinning.

We always advocate two big rules:
1. Use any drive for the purpose it was engineered for.
2. Always back up your data.

Is it possible to let the barracuda drive spin down and leave the Ironwolf ones spinning? 

[seagate_surfer]

15 hours ago, happymax1212 said:

Is it possible to let the barracuda drive spin down and leave the Ironwolf ones spinning? 

Hmm, not that I'm aware of, when drives are in RAID, I think you can only tell the RAID when to spin down, however if someone else knows more about this or has a solution, it would be interesting to learn about. The only other thing I can think of would be if you could have 2 separate arrays, one with the BarraCudas grouped and the other with the IronWolfs grouped, and then change the settings for the separate arrays.

[happymax1212]

8 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

Hmm, not that I'm aware of, when drives are in RAID, I think you can only tell the RAID when to spin down, however if someone else knows more about this or has a solution, it would be interesting to learn about. The only other thing I can think of would be if you could have 2 separate arrays, one with the BarraCudas grouped and the other with the IronWolfs grouped, and then change the settings for the separate arrays.

In my case, the barracuda is standalone, and the ironwolfs are in an array. 

[KirbyTech]

15 hours ago, happymax1212 said:

In my case, the barracuda is standalone, and the ironwolfs are in an array. 

So if it's just one drive then have it spin down and leave the ironwolfs running like they are meant to do. 

[happymax1212]

10 hours ago, KirbyTech said:

So if it's just one drive then have it spin down and leave the ironwolfs running like they are meant to do. 

How to do this in Windows Server?

[KirbyTech]

11 hours ago, happymax1212 said:

How to do this in Windows Server?

What is your exact setup? Windows Server 2012 r2? 2016? RAID or HBA card or software RAID. These all make some difference in how you do it mostly in the OS though. 

[happymax1212]

21 hours ago, KirbyTech said:

What is your exact setup? Windows Server 2012 r2? 2016? RAID or HBA card or software RAID. These all make some difference in how you do it mostly in the OS though. 

Windows Server 2012 R2， using software raid

[KirbyTech]

41 minutes ago, happymax1212 said:

Windows Server 2012 R2， using software raid

If you go to the Control panel, Power options, Change Plan Settings, Change Advanced Power Settings you'll find an option where you can turn the HDDs off after a certain amount of time.

 

That is from memory though so not 100% on it and don't feel like Getting onto my server(s) to check. See if it works and report back.

[happymax1212]

On 2018/2/3 at 10:05 PM, KirbyTech said:

If you go to the Control panel, Power options, Change Plan Settings, Change Advanced Power Settings you'll find an option where you can turn the HDDs off after a certain amount of time.

 

That is from memory though so not 100% on it and don't feel like Getting onto my server(s) to check. See if it works and report back.

But doing that will result in all drives spinning down together. I only want the Barracuda to spin down. And also strangely, the drives sometimes start spinning when no devices are visiting them...

[Dark]

If you're running any type of RAID array, it's best to leave them active while the system is on.

 

I've never powered down drives (from desktop to enterprise) and still have a good amount with over 1200 powered on days at 24/7 operation that are still performing well.  These drives are part of a media server that receives large amount of data at times and is constantly reading data.

 

I still have some ancient Samsung 60GB SSDs with nearly 2000 days of powered on use. 

[KirbyTech]

On 2/6/2018 at 4:53 AM, happymax1212 said:

But doing that will result in all drives spinning down together. I only want the Barracuda to spin down. And also strangely, the drives sometimes start spinning when no devices are visiting them...

I don't know then, I was thinking you would just run a script so it runs just before they shut down and it would write 1mb of data to those you want on. Not sure how well this would work in practice.