NAS does not go to sleep

[Shawn.S@AST]

Hi Robert,

If you need before we can get a more presentable way in UI, I can ask my engineer to come up with something similar as soon as possible next week first.

[nero78]

Hi erikl, torarnek and aj2,

Thanks for the kind feedback!!! Please kindly allow me to provide some further information on the hard drive hibernation which is a prerequisite for NAS going to sleep.

http://support.asustor.com/index.php?/K ... ation-mode

http://support.asustor.com/index.php?/K ... ith-my-nas

Not just apps but also a lot of services (samba, ftp, etc..) will have access to hard drives and this is the reason why in ADM, we have difficult time to detect, record and filter what have "touched" the hard drive and which one, which is related to the time user set for system going to sleep. For example, if you set 30 minutes, then we have to record and analyze all the apps and services during these 30 minutes; and if 60 minutes, then we will have to monitor, record and filter during 60 minutes. We are still thinking the way of reporting the status and the blocking item.

For the time being, you may check and see if the hard disk tray LED has slow blinking (around 7-8 seconds). If it has, then it indicates that the hard disk is in hibernation. If all the hard drives LED are in slow blinking, then the NAS should be able to enter S3 sleep mode within 30 minutes or the time interval you set.

And you can also experiment to turn off the apps or services and see if the hard drive can enter hibernation.

Funny you say 7-8 seconds because my system is accessing the HDD's every 7-8 seconds... (i do not use hibernation or spindown) I can hear clicking sounds 7-8 seconds apart without any acitivty on the NAS. IT's when i sleep and all computers are off.

[nero78]

I just recorded a video of the rythmic disk access on my NAS. There are nothing going on the NAS... The NAS will not go into spindown mode either...

https://youtu.be/Jiu0DmXj5w8

Is this noise normal? Never had this kind of access sound on any previous nas.

[Shawn.S@AST]

Hi Nero78,

Thanks for the feedback!

Together with our engineers, we have watched your video. We can tell that the regular noise is from hard drive and not from the other parts such as fan. But why the hard drive has regular noise, as we do not have enough information, we can not tell. Hard disk scan or some other regular indexing or scanning might lead to hard drive access also. And we hope to come up with the logging mechanism asap to help detect what process might get involved asap.

[Kerry]

I noticed that certain Seagate or Hitachi hard drive models give more noise than the others as well.

[nero78]

Hi Nero78,

Thanks for the feedback!

Together with our engineers, we have watched your video. We can tell that the regular noise is from hard drive and not from the other parts such as fan. But why the hard drive has regular noise, as we do not have enough information, we can not tell. Hard disk scan or some other regular indexing or scanning might lead to hard drive access also. And we hope to come up with the logging mechanism asap to help detect what process might get involved asap.

Thanks for reply. There are a lot of people with this problem (think general linux. i am very green on linux). This user might have a solution:

I might have found an explanation / solution:

The disk might be formatted to ex4 with "lazy inode table initialization", which postpones formatting until the disk is mounted. So I solutions is just to let it stay on until the disk is fully formatted!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2014443
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... dd-quickly
http://serverfault.com/questions/267393 ... -tb-raid-5

It's weird for my case because my drive it almost full so it should be formated...

[Arniceous]

I never put my NAS to sleep for the common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts such as interface, main rotor, arm drive and surfaces than ordinary running and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics and drives with 10+ years of age are working perfectly with no spindown/spinup.

Materials to vibrations, thermal conditions, etc. magnetic surface properties are also a big player in this equation... and many times are the factor that conditions the quality of the HD. Buy WD RED that's all I can suggest. And think twice before you want to put your NAS to sleep, be worried about HDD life and protect your data with backups for there is nothing more important than your data. NAS is expendable data is why you have one in the first place keep the HDD's running as long as possible and back them externally.

Hope this helps!