ZFS & NAS4Free's Power Management

[blazemonkey]

I'm running a RAID-Z2 with NAS4Free and I'm trying to lower power consumption of the box. I've got 6 WD NAS drives running off a cross-flashed IBM M1015.

I've had it running for months with the drives always on and power management disabled. In my situation, there shouldn't be a problem waiting for the array to spin up as I'm just using it for media and backup storage. I'm thinking of setting hard disk standby time to 30 mins, but not sure if I should set the "Advanced Power Management" to any particular level.

How do folks typically setup power management?

 

[rsq]

Well, I did it in a very special way.

I have an old server (liberated from the container at work) that runs my home ZFS setup which hosts my media share. This server has 2 old Xeon cpu's, still fabricated on the 90nm process. The box eats a continuous 350Watts of power. It's a total pig.

I was looking for a new server to reduce the power consumption, and noticed that 2 solar panels and a cheap Chinese power invertor were cheaper than a new server build.

I went that route, and hooked up a KWhr meter to the whole thing. Been running like that for 18 months now, and average power consumption of the box is now around 140Watts. And I do not have to heat the room housing the server.

There is no powersave setting on any PC that can match that.

I prefer this way because A: it is geeky and B: because I do not have the disks spin up and down.
Disks have a limited number of start cycles. I prefer to have them spin all the time than to spin them up and down. Their temperature is also more constant this way, and they shouldn't die from thermal shock.

Probably not the answer you were looking for, but I thought I'd share it anyway. Out of the box thinking and all that... EMBRACE THE MADNESS!

 

[PointandClick]

I don't know how many drives you're running, but 140w still seems excessive.
My old setup with an Athlon II quad and 3 disk raidz + old IDE boot drive pulled 70w at the wall with no drive spin down.
My new Xeon e3 setup, if I recall correctly pulls about 60 with an extra HBA card and a HD 6450.

I have my drives set to not spin down just because, to me, it's not worth the delay every time I want to get a file off the NAS. If you could set them to spin down once, after a specific time (like midnight) then I might consider it (OpenIndiana).

I'm not familiar with Nas4free, but I don't think you should need to set any advanced power management settings just to get the drives to spin down.

 

[rsq]

I don't know how many drives you're running, but 140w still seems excessive.

20 drives, in a homegrown external box with its own power supply.

I am not sure that ZFS will let the drives spin down automatically. I think it periodically checks the drives and thus keeps them awake. But don't just believe me, I am not certain of this.

 

[PointandClick]

20 drives, in a homegrown external box with its own power supply.

I am not sure that ZFS will let the drives spin down automatically. I think it periodically checks the drives and thus keeps them awake. But don't just believe me, I am not certain of this.

That makes a little more sense then.
If I remember right, OpenIndiana out of the box would spin down the drives. I had to edit my power.conf to set the disks as always on so I wouldn't have a delay every time I went to pull something off the NAS.

 

[SirMaster]

I know drives in ZFS on Linux can spin down automatically. Not sure about the other platforms though.