Any way to spin down a RAID array?

G

Gambit

Gawd
Joined
Aug 26, 2002
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I'm (still) looking at putting together a linux file server, powered by some kind of Areca card for the RAID array. Originally I was going to go with the WD GP drives because of the power savings... then I heard there may be some issues with them (aside from the TLER), so I looked at the Samsung F1's... same thing, so now I'm looking at Seagates.

My question is, since these drives don't really have any kind of power saving feature, is there a way to spin down the raid array when it's not in use? I know with IDE drives, it was possible to do this with hdparm, but I'm not sure with these drives, esp since they're SATA in an raid array.

One other question, I hear once you set up drives to do staggered spinup, they won't power up off the array... is this only for WD drives, or all drives in general? Do Seagates even do staggered spinup?
 
yes, but that shows using mdadm (for software raid), this is with a hardware controller card, which AFAIK won't be using mdadm
 
The Seagate ES series SATA drives will do TLER. Not sure about their other drives.
 
Mine will spin down by it self if I set that option in power management in Vista.
Works perfectly.
But you cannot chose which hard drive to spin down. Like if you have C:\, D:\, E:\, Array. Yo cannot say don't spin down C:\ and E:\ but spin down D:\
Not really an issue.

I have 8x1TB WD RE2 GP drives on a 3ware 9650SE controller...
 
thanks, but you have a different controller and you're not running linux
 
After more browsing, I found this page, which says "Support spin down drives when not in use to extend service life (MAID)". After more googling of "areca MAID", it appears this is also available on the 1220 as well.

Slightly irritating that this information wasn't included in the manual :(
 
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