Spinning Down Disks | Managing TrueNAS Core

hey guys so today i'm going to show you how to get your discs to spin down whenever they enter a standby mode in trueness why would you want to do this well basically any time your discs are spinning they're consuming electricity and if you're not actively reading from or writing to those discs i either in a standby mode well that's money that you could be saving and spending somewhere else the counter argument this tends to be that there's no real need to spin down the disks and that you would spin them up again so frequently that any savings and electricity is offset by the wear and tear on the drives but personally i think that there are situations where it makes sense to spin down the drives and there are other situations where it makes sense not to spin down the drives for example i've got one pool and i access it daily every couple of hours so spinning down the discs in that pool doesn't really make sense i've got another pool and i only ever access it every maybe once or twice a week which means that spinning them down saves me a lot more money and electricity than it does cost me in the wear and tear of the drives themselves so how do we get the drives to spin down well in this example i'm going to get the disks in the vault pool to spin down after 20 minutes so the very first thing we need to do is check which pool our system data set is being written to and read from what is the system data set system data set is basically some information about the trunas system that trunast needs to run so it contains things like our reports it contains encryption keys and some details on smb shares etc etc it's constantly being read from and written to and if that's the case well those drives in that pool can never be spun down because they're actively in use 24 7. how do i check which pool the system data set is using well if we hit the system button on the left hand side and then there's an option number six on the left hand side in that menu system data set and then we can see here that indeed the system data set is being written to our vault pool that's not what i want because i want those disks to spin down and they will never do that if they're constantly being written to so in the drop down menu i'm actually going to choose our boot pool those are ssds in the boot pool i know that they can take the system data set and i'm not worried about them spinning down so we're just going to hit the save option here truenas will warn me that the smb service is going to have to restart i'm fine with that so i'm going to hit continue and it's just going to think about it for a minute or two before it starts back up again so now true nas is using the boot pool for the system data set what do i need to do to get the drives to spin down well if we go on the left-hand side to the storage tab we can choose the disks option which is fourth on the the menu down and then we can see we've got a list of all of the disks in our system here and the pool that they're available in so we can see this first one for example is in the vault pool which is the pool that i'd like to get the disks to spin down in so if i hit this little arrow button on the right hand side i get a couple of options here and then i can just hit edit so i've already set these drives to spin down after 20 minutes you can see here in the hdd standby option i've selected 20 minutes instead of the default always on option there's an option here to force the hard disk drive into standby mode and that's normally to force it into standby mode if it's running software checks like a scrub or doing a snapshot and i don't recommend that you choose that option then under the advanced power level management i've selected level one minimum power usage with standby spin down causing the disks to spin down whenever they go um into a a standby mode there's another option here for an acoustic level i've set that to disabled this really doesn't have a lot of bearing on whether or not your drives will go into standby mode and a lot of modern drives don't respect those settings anyway so i i'm not concerned about leaving that option as disabled and then there are a couple of other options here that we're not going to go into now but it's this hdd standby and the advanced power management those are the two settings that we're interested in just going to save those options and then what we would do is go through all of the drives in the pool itself and repeat the same options so if i pick this other drive ada 11 in the the pool and hit edit you can see that i've also set that to 20 minutes with the advanced power management set to one so now that we've told the drives to enter a standby mode after 20 minutes how do we validate that it's actually doing that well unfortunately there's no easy way in the gui but we are able to run a command line that will tell us whether or not the drives are spinning so i'm just going to go back here to my disks interface and i'm going to take a note of what the name of the drives are that i'm interested in so in this case i'm interested in ada1 that's the drive in my vault pool that i want to spin down but we're also just going to take note of the fact that ada0 is in the freenas boot pool and we would expect that drive to constantly be spinning so then i'm just going to hit the shell option here on the left hand side and i've got a command that i'm going to paste into the trunas shell interface using shift insert because i'm on a windows machine and i will include this command in the description of the video below so the important bit of this command we can see it's cam control cmd and then we've got the name of the drive that we're interested in ada 1 or ada0 so very very first one i'm going to check a drive that should be spinning ada0 i'm going to hit enter and then we get very interesting results we can see here that we get some binary as a result and in the second last option the tenth column from the left and the second last we can see that the results are ff which indicates to me that the drive is spinning right now and that's exactly what we'd expect from our boot pool if i go back and i run the same command again but with ada 1 which is the disk in our vault pool we wanted to spin down i can see that i get similar results but i get 0 0 in the second last column in the 10th column from the left and the second last column we get zero zero indicating that the drives are spun down and they're correctly in standby mode so that's it guys that's how you get your disks to spin down whenever they enter a standby mode and that's how you validate that they have indeed spun down so at this stage i'm going to ask you again to do the youtube dance which is to like comment and subscribe if you've enjoyed this content it really helps the channel out and helps tell the algorithm to push it out to other users otherwise i will catch you guys on the flip side

Channel: Blackbeard Support

Views: 132

Keywords: Blackbeard, Support, How to, NAS, TrueNAS Core, FreeNAS

Id: WvCURgT151c

Length: 6min 3sec (363 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021