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drive throttling software

H

h_2_o

Gawd
Joined
Dec 27, 2002
Messages
633
I was curious if such a piece of software existed. I have a box that could use some heat reduction and besides everything else i've tried throttling or somehow limiting the speed of a HD would help out a lot. or at least be able to pm each drive seperately. if anyone knows if there is such a beast please let me know.

thanks
 
maybe u need to inspect change or add to your fans/ cooling methodes. i dun see how throttling would do much. go buy a 5800rpm drive then.. wait do those still exist? heh
 
paradoxblue said:
maybe u need to inspect change or add to your fans/ cooling methodes. i dun see how throttling would do much. go buy a 5800rpm drive then.. wait do those still exist? heh
Click to expand...

5800rpms eh? :p the 5400rpms do exist, but that of course entails much slower performance
 
actually today a bunch of us were discussing this and nobody still knows if there is such a piece of hardware, but we did come up with some other uses for it. if your machine is not a performance monster or you have a server that is not a super high end one throttling down a drive to 50% or lower could do a lot of things for you especially today. if i could power the drives down, less energy would be used and i work for some companies that have several petabytes running that are not always dependant on speed. taking the speed down on those for the server would not only save energy because they are spinning slower, but also heat up less and cause the server rooms to need as much cooling. Hopefully a utility like this exists i would bet there could be a lot more uses for it as well.
 
Turning off drives is already a part of Windows Power Management. If your BIOS and hardware support it, just go turn it on.
 
mikeblas said:
Turning off drives is already a part of Windows Power Management. If your BIOS and hardware support it, just go turn it on.
Click to expand...

QFT.

I've used that feature in the past and it works great. You cant even tell the pc is still on.

I not sure about using it on servers though. Would a program accessing data on server "wake" up the drives or do you have to interact with the sever itself for it to come out of power save mode?
 
Yes, just like it does on your laptop. So you're just paying a huge latency penalty on that a first access as the drive spins up. People around here claim to use this very setup when they build PC+software = firewall solutions. The machine boots up from the spinning media, gets loaded and configured, then the drive spins down again.
 
yes windows does have pm to power drives down, but for a server setup that does not need insane amounts of throughput but needs it none the less having the drive spinning at 50% might be nice.
 
5400 rpm is about 50% of 10000 rpm, and 7200 rpm is about 50% of 15000 rpm. Maybe your drives are already running at 50%!
 
Go out and buy laptop harddrive and use adapters to connect to your IDE / SATA ports..

alot less power and heat.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Go out and buy laptop harddrive and use adapters to connect to your IDE / SATA ports..

alot less power and heat.
Click to expand...

They tend to have less throughput though...
 
Is it not clear that h_2_o wants to trade throughput for less power and noise?
 
ah sorry 54. sorry i dont use them old age machines anymore :p

i would also love to know this. there for leaving my serve ron ove rnight it will dull right down when im not using it. save my ass some power. lol
 
initially i was looking at this as a heat issue only thing, however after discussing it with friends it appears that such an idea would have many more benefits rather than just heat reduction.

as for just getting a lappy drive, well for server's you really cant do that. if you are looking at this and thinking well i need the highest performance for my games to play then you are not understanding what this could actually do for companies.

edit: as for trading throughput for something else, think of this scenario. a company needs 50TB online with full throughput from 8am to 6pm, the rest of the day the drives get approximately 20% usage so they still need to be spinning. so let's be a bit safe here and say that from 7:30pm to 6:30am the drives are throttled to 35%. this would allow for the 20% throughput with some margin of error. also for those hours it would help conserve quite a bit of power via heat produced and just running. now with larger companies that have huge datacenters that this might work for the savings would not be minimal at all.
 
h_2_o said:
initially i was looking at this as a heat issue only thing, however after discussing it with friends it appears that such an idea would have many more benefits rather than just heat reduction.

as for just getting a lappy drive, well for server's you really cant do that. if you are looking at this and thinking well i need the highest performance for my games to play then you are not understanding what this could actually do for companies.

edit: as for trading throughput for something else, think of this scenario. a company needs 50TB online with full throughput from 8am to 6pm, the rest of the day the drives get approximately 20% usage so they still need to be spinning. so let's be a bit safe here and say that from 7:30pm to 6:30am the drives are throttled to 35%. this would allow for the 20% throughput with some margin of error. also for those hours it would help conserve quite a bit of power via heat produced and just running. now with larger companies that have huge datacenters that this might work for the savings would not be minimal at all.
Click to expand...

too bad you couldnt just set a time when the drives could be in a hibernate type mode, but then again, if they are not being accessed, does it really matter if you could do that?
 
thats not wut there saying.
hyernate mode doesnt work as thats not what were after.

We mean at night the drives are only accessed by AV or one person at a time and can be run as a 5400rpm or less drive. but during the day they may need the 10k or so power
 
J-Mag said:
They tend to have less throughput though...
Click to expand...


but if you want to throttle drives down that will get you less through put... if he means the RPM's, as faster RPMs = more heat + more power consumption... i think.
 
paradoxblue said:
thats not wut there saying.
hyernate mode doesnt work as thats not what were after.

We mean at night the drives are only accessed by AV or one person at a time and can be run as a 5400rpm or less drive. but during the day they may need the 10k or so power
Click to expand...

ah, now i understand. this is now an even more interesting idea.
 
going over something on maxtor's site made me think this may be more possible than i was thinking it might be. they along with seagate have an "acustic tuning" software which basically configures the drive for better or worse performance depending on if you want the drive to have more or less noise. it appears to be part of s.m.a.r.t. now i just have to read up on smart and see if there is any good documentation on if there is a way to accomplish this task.
 
The Hitachi Feature Tool is the best way for tweaking seek power/noise. Works on everything except Seagate drives. Seagate knows what's best for you, and doesn't allow user control of actuator power settings.

You mention Maxtor...are you using Maxtor drives? Switching to just about any other brand will reduce power consumption pretty dramatically. In the case of ATA drives, switching to Hitachi drives will shave a full watt per spindle on idle power consumption, while WD drives will use better than 3 watts less than a Maxtor unit during full seeking, a better than 25% reduction in power used and heat dissipated.

Take a look at this thermal data: http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_2=285&devID_3=299&devID_4=301&devCnt=5
 
no i dont use maxtor currently, seagate and hitichi mostly. I was there just browsing some of thier tech docs because i thought i remembered them having something that did some type of throttling. anyway the search continues for a utility or documentation that will help me achieve my goal :)
 
I am not trying to take this thread on a tangent, as this relates to power and heat consumption in a multi disk server.

Is it possible to have different power management settings on different drives? For instance; I rarely use my data drives, so I would want them to spin down, but I want my primary OS drive to be always on. Is this possible?
 
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