HELP - Drives Don't Idle (DNS-323)

[Jack Santos]

I just installed Alt-F on a DNS-323, however, after 48 hours the drives continue to spin and do not idle.  Under Disk Utilities I've set idle at 10min and also tried Power Saving at High and Medium, but with no effect. The drives just continue to spin and do not idle.

Any help would be appreciated.  

The particulars are:

- Installed Alt-F 1.0

- Two WD 8TB drives (WD80EFBX, NASware 3.0)

- RAID1 mirroring

- Drives are currently empty (no data, except for system defaults and one user directory)

- CPU is running at 17%, memory utilization is 45%, system temp 45C/113F, HDD temp 48C/118F

This is my first install of ALT-F (nooblie, but tech knowledge). Everything flashed and booted without issue and the NAS and Alt-F appear to work well.  I have another issue with the static IP not sticking (keeps defaulting to the original DHCP assigned IP), but that is a secondary non-critical issue that I'll deal with later. My biggest concern is the drives not idling which reduces the drive life-span.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have four other older Dlink NAS units that I'd like to flash with Alt-F, but this non-idling is a deal breaker if I can't get it resolved.

Thanks in advance.

Jack...

[Alexander Holzinger]

Hi Jack,

did you configure power saving under Disk Utilities?

It must say 'Medium' or 'High' for the drives to be able to spin down.

I am not sure if the alt packages keep drives spinning, that's why I moved them onto an usb stick.

My Toshiba drives are on standby most of the time.

Best wishes

Alex

[Joao Cardoso]

On Thursday, May 23, 2024 at 4:04:33 PM UTC+1 jackja...@gmail.com wrote:

I just installed Alt-F on a DNS-323, however, after 48 hours the drives continue to spin and do not idle.  Under Disk Utilities I've set idle at 10min and also tried Power Saving at High and Medium, but with no effect. The drives just continue to spin and do not idle.

The only role Alt-F takes regarding drive spin-down is to inform the disk drives to spin down after XX minutes of inactivity.

If the drives don't spin down is because they are being accessed regularly.

That access can be either from box running programs or from regular network access.

You can exercise that by logging into the box using ssh or telnet as the 'root' user, same pass as the webUI, and issuing the command 'hdparm -y /dev/sd?'. The drives should spin down and the bow two orange leds should shortly flash every two or three seconds. Issuing 'hdparm -C /dev/sd?' shows the drives current status (besides the two orange leds shortly (200ms) flashing).

After putting the drives in standby, you can logout, unplug the box network cable and , *without* using the webUI -- which in most of the cases have to spinup the drives to obtain its status -- see through the orange leds if the drives have been powered up. You can so know where the spinup comes from -- either internally by a running program, or through the network.

Some running programs might access the drives regularly, avoiding them to spindown.

Can you post the output of the command 'pstree'? Or though the webUI, System->Utilities->View Logs->Running Process

Have you installed any Alt-F or Entware package? The recommended way to install those is through a dedicated, always plugged-in, small USB pen drive with and ext3/4 filesystem; that way running programs from those packages will not powerup the disks.