Things to do to avoid disks spinning up

[jani.p...@gmail.com]

Hi all

On my current setup, I have USB-drive where I store and download my torrents. 

I've also changed the smartd configuration and do the checks manually via cron.

Yet, I notice the main drive spinning up, at least during the late evening, perhaps some other times too. Checked cron that there are no entries causing spin up. 

as of now, I assume the only thing that could be resposible for the spinups, is the system itself, perhaps the system logging.

Checking from the Services -> system I have syslog running. Will i get tons of trouble I disable this one?

Or would I be better off using the package manager to copy the system to USB-drive (USB-Stick) and then chroot to that one? (I'm bit afraid of the idea of marking the USB drive as active system partition, in case something goes south with the usb drive).

[jani.p...@gmail.com]

Looked at the FAQ, which pointed me to an older discussion thread, which basically instructs to go to the web GUi, copy ALT-F to USB and set bootable.

Before doing that, I'd like to know what will happen in case the USB is not present? Say, I somehow manage to botch this up and the system does not boot from USB, so I remove the UBM stick. What will happen then?

Before installing alt-f I had Fonz FFP running on USB, and my drive had average start_stop_count (as counted from reports by smartctl) of 3.5 per day. now with alt-f installed on HD, it's 23 per day. Of course, I've done lot of stuff with the system as it's new, but when working on the system, the drives are constantly spinning, so the total count is not that much affected.

[jani.p...@gmail.com]

Quote from old message:

Packages->Alt-F

You select a Ext2/3/4  mounted filesystem in the USB and select CopyTo; then uncheck the current "Boot Enable" and check the copied to fs, Submit, then reboot. After the reboot you can Delete the not in use location.

====================== End quote ======================

What about the "ActivateNow" Button? Currently I have sdb2 and sda4 with boot enabled checked, and sdb2 active.

What does boot enabled do versus "active" status?

[Евгений Евланов]

Hello! 

Actually if your USV drive is not availiable, system will boot, but without extra packages. This will not wipe your data. I'm sure - you can test removal of USB drive on working system. I bet that system will hang if no free RAM would be aviliable (and no SWAP), also extra services, which you had added in packages, will stop.  

My disks where spinning too almost all the time. If there is a swap partition on disks, script (in web interface) does not enable "Stendby" mode. You can examine scripts in web-cgi folder. I use cron task to enable standby for both disks (with command "hddparm") every hour. But if you have active services this will not help - they can write to disk something, so disks will continue spinning. 

I think it's a good idea to move ALT-F packages AND SWAP Partiitoin to USB. 

About logging: I know that some people write system logs to tmp FS (to RAM) for systems on PC. As for ALT-F i think it is possible to do so, but before doing this you should understand that there is no much RAM in the device and uptime can be very big. So the logs can be very big and you should clean logs manually or with the system task to prevent insufficient RAM. Also, with this approach, we have a minus that old logs will be unavailible for analysys after reboot. 

I'm also newbie in ALT-F, but I have several devices DNS-322 and DNR-122L running on ALT-F. I had some issues with them, mosly with DNR-122L. 

Q:What about the "ActivateNow" Button? Currently I have sdb2 and sda4 with boot enabled checked, and sdb2 active.

What does boot enabled do versus "active" status?

A: It means than packages installed on the drive will "connect" to your system, so the services from hdd will appear in the list of installed packeges, and some services will be availiable to start from menu "Services (Network, System, User)". 

Best regards, 

Eugene Evlanov

воскресенье, 2 февраля 2025 г. в 20:46:27 UTC+6, jani.p...@gmail.com:

[jani.p...@gmail.com]

I bit the bullet and enabled ALT-F on the usb.

To answer my own question "What does activateNow button do": I think it does chroot or similar to new destination. I was not able to execute that successfully as I had services running which had files open at the old alt-f root. So I set the usb as only place which was enabled and restarted the NAS. Everything went fine. 

Also I updated my transmission bittorrent config file to set log level to 0 (minimum / no logging). After these changes, I've noticed that I haven't notice the disk spinning up that often. 

I didn't move the swap to USB, because the data transfer rates are just too slow, any swap access would grind the system to halt. And with the DNS-325 having generous 256Megs of RAM, it barely hits the swap in my configuration. (NTFS, SMB, Transmission configured to have max of just few active torrents)

Also noticed that my clock battery on DNS-325 has died. I had my system powered off for some 30 minutes as I made backup of the USB stick. Up on booting, it was fsck time (time of last fsck on 2025, clock currently "2000 or so..."). the fsck took like ages compared to the time when I did it manually. I need to update the interval between the check to 0, to disable the time based fsck, just use the mount count based. At least until I have replaced the battery. It's Duracell 307/357 btw.

[jani.p...@gmail.com]

After moving Alt-f to USB stick and setting transmission log level to zero, the start_stop_count per day is even less than it was prior alt-f. And I've been tinkering with the box more than average. Currently the active HD has average of 2.6 for start_stop_count per day. I wonder if the counter gets incremented with one for each start and again with one for the stop, or if it's one start + one stop which will increment the counter.

Also in relation to the battery. I orderred myself Duracell 307/357 battery. They are bit hard to come by. When changing the battery, I noticed the original being Maxell LR44. 

For the duracell I paid about 5€ for package of two. The maxell you can get a pack of 10 for 2€ and it's available everywhere.

Both have same voltage, but Duracell capacity is 50% more than the LR44. That explains the price difference. 

It was a bit pain in the backside to change the battery, so paying couple of euro more is OK for me.