Automatically Spin Down Unused Drives?

J

John G.

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 28, 2005
Messages
163
(I bolded the important stuff if you want to skim.)

Hey guys, I'm currently running a 3x750 + 1x320 storage server with room for only minimal cooling. Now that summer months are here, hard drive temperatures are creeping into the mid-60s. Yikes! For the time being, I've been shutting down the system except when I absolutely need it, but this is not a long term solution. Installing any cooling capable of making a real dent in these temperatures is not very feasible at this point, so I'm looking into other options.

Since this is a storage system, it's great to have the machine online all the time and the drives ready for use, but they don't necessarily have to be spun up all the time. The drives are idle more often than not and only one drive is used at a time (typically). So instead of having all four drives (which are in close proximity to each other) heating each other up, is it possible to automatically spin down drives not in use?

I'd hope there would be some sort of software solution for this. I'm not running any RAID, but maybe something through Windows would be capable of doing what I'm after? Can anyone offer some advice?
 
60c or 60f?


Also, check in your power savings profile to turn off hard drives after use.
 
60C. I'm outside of the operating temperature range given by the drive spec sheet. I'd be so stoked if it were 60F. ;)
 
Ockie said:
check in your power savings profile to turn off hard drives after use.
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Also, can you tell me if Windows power management turns off hard drive individually when one isn't accessed for a while, or if it turns off all hard drives when there is no disk activity across any of them? The latter would be far less useful.
 
John G. said:
60C. I'm outside of the operating temperature range given by the drive spec sheet. I'd be so stoked if it were 60F. ;)
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Haha, I figured I'd make sure first. I feel your pain, right now my AC is broken at home so I'm soaking up 100+F temperatures in the room.

John G. said:
Also, can you tell me if Windows power management turns off hard drive individually when one isn't accessed for a while, or if it turns off all hard drives when there is no disk activity across any of them? The latter would be far less useful.
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Windows powers down each drive, not all at once. You can use your system but the inactive drives will sleep until you access them.
 
Ockie said:
Windows powers down each drive, not all at once. You can use your system but the inactive drives will sleep until you access them.
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Thanks so much! I'll try it out when I get home today, and hopefully will see lower temps as a result. Good luck with that AC man. :)
 
Well I got home and enabled the power management settings for the hard drives-- but it didn't really lower temperatures. Should I have expected anything else?
 
John G. said:
Installing any cooling capable of making a real dent in these temperatures is not very feasible at this point, so I'm looking into other options.
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How come it's not feasible? What case are you using for this storage server?
 
Need to ask a silly question. Have you even tried to just unplug one drive and see what happens with the temps? You are spending quite a bit of effort to figure a way to save heat w/o knowing how big the benefit will be.

Also, most HDD of the large size tend to have a 15C rise at idle and 25C rise under load with no fan cooling. However, HDD's greatly benefit from even a little bit of fan air due to their large surface area.
 
Danny Bui said:
How come it's not feasible? What case are you using for this storage server?
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It's a Dell Optiplex GX150 tower case-- so not a lot of room on the inside for additional case fans. I'm using the four 3.5" internal bays for my four hard drives so they're all stacked one on top of the other. If anyone knows of any good fan options that mount directly onto that 3.5" drive cage, that would probably be a viable option.

Trepidati0n said:
Need to ask a silly question. Have you even tried to just unplug one drive and see what happens with the temps? You are spending quite a bit of effort to figure a way to save heat w/o knowing how big the benefit will be.
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I haven't, but I'm sure the drives' proximity to one another is a big factor in the high temperatures. They're literally almost touching. Power management seemed like a painless way to save heat, but I guess it wasn't the magic solution I was hoping for. I'll leave it enabled regardless; it certainly can't hurt drive temps.
 
Why are you spinning them down? To save power? Or to lower drive use?

If it is to save power, go for it. But leaving the drives spinning (with clean power) may actually increase their life, as opposed to always spinning them down and back up again.

Not really related, but here is an interesting study by google on their large collection of consumer drives: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Also note, from that study, that lower temperatures cause more failures than high temperatures except at the extreme high.
 
Lazn_Work said:
Why are you spinning them down? To save power? Or to lower drive use?

If it is to save power, go for it. But leaving the drives spinning (with clean power) may actually increase their life, as opposed to always spinning them down and back up again.

Not really related, but here is an interesting study by google on their large collection of consumer drives: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Also note, from that study, that lower temperatures cause more failures than high temperatures except at the extreme high.
Click to expand...

Umm...so when I brought my car home, and I left it idling in the garage, it would last longer...brilliant! As long as those platters are spinning you are causing wear on the drives. But you add a different set of wear on the drive when you spin it up. However, I highly doubt that spinning up a drive 3 or 4 times a day will be even close to the amount of wear caused by leaving it run 24/7. Those motors have very good start torque and thus get back EMF up quite quickly.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Umm...so when I brought my car home, and I left it idling in the garage, it would last longer...brilliant!
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Actually true... http://www.pre-luber.com/march99nationalbusart.htm

A friend of my dad's has a 1970's Mercedes diesel car up in Alaska, that in the winter he simply never shuts off except to change the oil. (for decades now) This was mostly because older diesels are harder to start in the extreme cold. (being diesel, he can fill it up with it running and it doesn't care, also it uses very little while idling) But when he had a few older gaskets replaced they found that there was almost no metal wear in the engine. (this is a story my dad told me many years ago, so take it with a grain of salt)

Not sure if it applies to disk drives as well, but the google study I listed above showed a 2% higher failure rate on drives that had more power cycles. (not much different so they didn't conclude anything from it)
 
Trepidati0n said:
Umm...so when I brought my car home, and I left it idling in the garage, it would last longer...brilliant! As long as those platters are spinning you are causing wear on the drives. But you add a different set of wear on the drive when you spin it up. However, I highly doubt that spinning up a drive 3 or 4 times a day will be even close to the amount of wear caused by leaving it run 24/7. Those motors have very good start torque and thus get back EMF up quite quickly.
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It's not always the speed or torque of the motors that is the reason for drive failures. Heating up, Cooling down, powering up, powering down, etc etc etc. Many factors comes into play.

FWIW, I run all my drives 24/7 and the failures has been none with the exception of a couple new drives which failed right from the first boot. And I've ran many drives past their expiry.

Also, if this was true, datacenters would be replacing a lot more drives than desktop machines in the workplace.... which also isn't the case. Drives running all the time are better off than drives being constantly rebooted.

Another thing worth noting, the only wear on a running drive is the bearings, which are meant to run for a long long long time.


PS. Starting and switching your car off is worse on the engine than it running. Running the car actually does improve the lifespan, although this is disputed as you can't really leave your car running all the time and the gas would offset any benifits you would gain from the longer lifespan.

EDIT: Quote I found:
Frequent restarting has little impact on engine components like battery and starter motor. Wear caused by restarting is estimated to add $10 per year to the cost of driving, money likely recovered several times over in fuel savings. (Natural Resources Canada)
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From Washington State Department of Ecology Idling Reduction Fact Sheet

There is also a reason why people state "Highway miles" when they are trying to get more for their car, as repeated stops, restarts, and such tends to wear an engine... 5-10 minute drives tends to clog up your engine and doesn't allow the oil to lubricate and circulate, nor does it allow moisture in the exhaust to cook out.
 
If we had to identical hard-drives (down to the atom) and ran one 24/7 versus one I power once a year...which do you think would last longer? Of course, the same applies if I power cycled a drive 10-20x a day versus not cycling at all. If the OP was using the data on the drive once every couple of days, it would make sense to power it down. However, if he is using it 2x or 3x a day, then Ockie is right and it would make sense to keep it powered.

One of the biggest indicators that a motor is approaching failure (many HDD are already failed but keep operating because they are not spun down) is the current will increase. If HDD maker would spend a dollar installing a current sensor for the power inputs, we could trend our drive data and thus start seeing a failure before it is a problem.
 
John G, your best bet for better cooling is to just get a new case that has a bit room for airflow around your drives. Here's a cheap case that should provide decent cooling for your hard drives since there's a spot for a 120mm fan to blow on your drives:

Cooler Master Centurion 534 ATX Case - $35
 
Anyone know a way to set a power down time per HDD? I have one HDD used mostly for backup that I'd like to power itself down since I use it rarely. After a quick look I found a program called Hddscan that lets you power down the drives manually, but didn't see anything automatic.
 
curtisfong said:
turn off polling
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Okay cool I didn't know temp polling kept the drives from powering down (guess it is kind of a no-brainer though). Thanks for the help, I'll try that immediately.

Lazn_Work said:
Here is an interesting study by google on their large collection of consumer drives: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Also note, from that study, that lower temperatures cause more failures than high temperatures except at the extreme high.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm spinning the drives down to try to lower temperatures. Saving power and less noice might be side-benefits, but the main thing is the temperatures. I'm seeing higher than 60C on three of my four drives, which I'm pretty sure constitutes "extreme high". It might be worth the stop/start wear and tear, especially since the drives would be accessed fairly infrequently.

Danny Bui said:
John G, your best bet for better cooling is to just get a new case that has a bit room for airflow around your drives.
Click to expand...

You're absolutely right, I know it. But I don't want to give up my current case. And for me, compromising on requirements of a project instead of looking for that one way where you can have your cake and eat it too-- well there's just no fun in that. I'm an engineer after all. :)
 
I'm not sure if you're aware of this but SPCR proved a long time ago that HDDs actually get a lot hotter around the sides than over the top/bottom... So while having them bunched up in several drive bays still raises temperatures and creates a hotspot, it isn't necessarily a bad way of mounting them if there's proper airflow.

The drive cage itself will conduct some of the heat away, altho there's obviously better arrangements if you were able to move some of the drives elsewhere. You could always put one or two on external enclosures and shut 'em down yourself as a last resort.
 
create some air flow over your drives. after building my new system i found my HD was reaching 55c when in use so all i did was installed a small 90mm fan in the front of my case , behind mesh grills and it pushes the air above and below my drive. and now my drive never reaches temp over 45c.so, i would say, install a fan which would push air between your hard drives.
 
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