AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

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Marcin Szczurowski
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AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by Marcin Szczurowski »

Hi,
I'm fighting AS5304T for a couple of days now.
It looks like tech support don't know what to do, as we exchanged a couple of emails already and nothing worked.

The issue: AS5304T with 4x4TB HGST drives powers down HDD's and after some time, it powers them back on again. Cycle repeats irregularly.
When I set HDD sleep to 15 minutes, it never went to sleep.

So I checked what's accessing the drive.
There was only mdadm and postgresql, which I tracked with terminal and htop/tree view, it turned out to be a child of text converter in Docker.
I turned off 3/4 of apps, it didn't help.
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I gathered logs and sent them to tech support. Reply was: uninstall one app at a time until it works.
Not what I was expecting really.
I just dumped everything.
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NAS powered disks on once after that, so I checked configs again and rebooted it.
I also set NTP query to happen 1/month and turned on hibernation log.
I'll see what will happen tonight and during following days.

For me it looks like a very severe bug.
There were many functionalities advertised, one of most important for home NAS being 3 power states. And it doesn't work.
NAS with 4x7200RPM enterprise class disks can't just start randomly when it's 4m from my bed. It's useless for me.
I don't understand how Asustor can get away with selling device, where a major selling point (power mgmt) is crippled by the system or apps, which are advertised as well.
From my POV, it should be well noted on the product homepage, which apps will cause HDD's waking up, so maybe people would instead leave drives on, or consider power off.

Did you have problems with NAS waking up HDDs for no apparent reason?
Any solutions?
Od did anyone pinpointed problematic app or process?
Marcin Szczurowski
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Joined: Fri Jan 28, 2022 4:22 am

Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by Marcin Szczurowski »

Update:
It woke up.
With no apps at all and no network activity towards it.

Any debug ideas appreciated.
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orion
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Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by orion »

I need some apps to work all the time. So my solution is to create volume-1 using one SSD. And I create volume-2 (RAID-5) using normal disks. In this way, when NAS is idle for a while, volume-2 disks will go to sleep mode (turn motor off).
Marcin Szczurowski
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Joined: Fri Jan 28, 2022 4:22 am

Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by Marcin Szczurowski »

Seems like it.
Even in a state when I deleted everything and disabled all cyclic activities, I get random spin ups.
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It's weird that activity takes place on disks intended for userspace, not a dedicated eMMC soldered to main PCB or even a ramdisk.
I'll find some USB storage and check id it works, which probably will mean reset to factory settings, I have to take apart anyway as HDD's vibrations cause chassis to make weird buzz (something's loose), and reinitialize with USB drive as volume 1.
Although I can see a risk of trashing applications and system instability if external USB port will loose contact tension and glitch on random.
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Nazar78
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Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by Nazar78 »

If I set my settings to more than 15 mins, all my disks will not go to sleep. 5 to 10 mins yeah maybe they will. Besides the diagnostic logs, I noticed these services are always active:

1. watchmand (this constantly uses few % of CPU)
2. volmand
3. emboardmand

If these were killed then the disks happily goes to sleep a lot longer unless there's activities. Also I've been having this issue since ADM 4 not in ADM 3.5.
Last edited by Nazar78 on Wed Mar 02, 2022 1:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
AS5304T - 16GB DDR4 - ADM-OS modded on 2GB RAM
Internal:
- 4x10TB Toshiba RAID10 Ext4-Journal=Off
External 5 Bay USB3:
- 4x2TB Seagate modded RAID0 Btrfs-Compression
- 480GB Intel SSD for modded dm-cache (initramfs auto update patch) and Apps

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chris.e
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Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by chris.e »

What apps do you have installed?

Also make sure you aren't logging CPU, network , ram usage etc on the "activity monitor settings"

If you really dont want it waking the disks at night then just set it to sleep at wake at set times.
steve6443
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Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by steve6443 »

Exactly the same problem here. Set a scheduled time for it to sleep - wakes up 2 minutes later. No logging going on, no apps installed. What a pathetic piece of crap this truly is.... Annoyed enough because of the additional work I had to put in due to DeadBolt - my system was impacted, had to restore it - but now this feature won't even work? Previously it did, but now it won't.....
chris.e
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Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by chris.e »

I think you are being overly harsh. Disks on a Linux or Windows or Linux PC don't sleep these days, to get that you have to have the OS on a different disk to the data store. The same applies here, if you install volume1 on an SSD and use the remaining slots for a volume 2 storage location, then volume 2 disks will sleep forever.

As it stands it is possible to get volume1 disks to sleep you just have to ensure you have nothing that is periodically accessing it. Here are some of the actions i took when I was bothered about making them sleep. (I don't worry now.)

Plex - there's settings to monitor for new files, this has to be disabled or it will constantly (or periodically depending on the setting) check the disk for new files.
ADM - Turn off usage history on activity monitor.
- Logging, turn off all logging. (System information, log, preferences
- Ezsync, obviously don't use that as it still be constantly trying to check for changes to synchronise.
- Mail Server - turn off
- Don't set snapshot centre to regularly take snapshots, use per day or something.
- Shared drives, make sure any laptops etc aren't accessing a shared drive. Try unsharring or ensuring they're not being indexed by another device.
chris.e
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Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by chris.e »

There is a diagnostic tool on EnergyControl tab of Settings/Hardware
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Nazar78
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Re: AS5304T turns on HDD's - disk sleep crippled

Post by Nazar78 »

chris.e wrote:I think you are being overly harsh. Disks on a Linux or Windows or Linux PC don't sleep these days, to get that you have to have the OS on a different disk to the data store. The same applies here, if you install volume1 on an SSD and use the remaining slots for a volume 2 storage location, then volume 2 disks will sleep forever.

As it stands it is possible to get volume1 disks to sleep you just have to ensure you have nothing that is periodically accessing it. Here are some of the actions i took when I was bothered about making them sleep. (I don't worry now.)

Plex - there's settings to monitor for new files, this has to be disabled or it will constantly (or periodically depending on the setting) check the disk for new files.
ADM - Turn off usage history on activity monitor.
- Logging, turn off all logging. (System information, log, preferences
- Ezsync, obviously don't use that as it still be constantly trying to check for changes to synchronise.
- Mail Server - turn off
- Don't set snapshot centre to regularly take snapshots, use per day or something.
- Shared drives, make sure any laptops etc aren't accessing a shared drive. Try unsharring or ensuring they're not being indexed by another device.
There is a diagnostic tool on EnergyControl tab of Settings/Hardware
My OS (volume0) and apps have been relocated running on external an SSD, they got backup every midnight. My logs and tmp also have been relocated running on memory (tmpfs), these are disposable to me so I don't mind losing them. Raid-10 (volume1) in the NAS is only data. Raid-5 (volume2) in an external bay only backup of NAS data. This wasn't happening with the previous firmware 3.5. I'm aware of the diagnostic tool but it doesn't help much. It's showing all the readouts for volume1 and volume2 (seldom volume0) from mdadm, nothing written, whether the disks are sleeping or not so it's not much of help.

E.g. while both volume1 and volume2 shows only read access from mdadm (nothing written), but the disks are in fact asleep. I monitor them via smart for a period of time as per the screenshot. But for unknown reason somehow they got randomly woken up seen from the smart query, nothing particular shown in the diagnostic tool except for the mdadm readouts. If I swap the NAS OS to run Ubuntu instead from an external SSD, the raid disks will not wake up unless required.
Screenshot 2022-03-02 011324.png
Screenshot 2022-03-02 011324.png (12.42 KiB) Viewed 3310 times
Edited: Oh my swap (md126) is also off.
Last edited by Nazar78 on Wed Mar 02, 2022 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
AS5304T - 16GB DDR4 - ADM-OS modded on 2GB RAM
Internal:
- 4x10TB Toshiba RAID10 Ext4-Journal=Off
External 5 Bay USB3:
- 4x2TB Seagate modded RAID0 Btrfs-Compression
- 480GB Intel SSD for modded dm-cache (initramfs auto update patch) and Apps

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