Drive suspend / idle spindown

davet218

With drive pool will my drives go to sleep idle spindown or will they stay active i have alot of drives attached to my server and it would cost alot to keep them running 24 7 365

Paaland

A Western Digital Caviar Green HDD will draw 6W when read/write (and only 5.5 when idle).

Say for simplisity you are reading or writing ALL the time. Thats 6W * 24h * 365 days = 52 KWh in a year. I don't know about power costs where you live. But there I pay about NOK 1 (inkl all taxes) or USD 0.17 pr kWh. So the cost of having that drive spinning all year is about $9. Not something I loos any sleep over.

If you want to save money on electricity start turning off all lights in all rooms there are no people, turn down the heat/AC and try to take shorter showers One HDD is like pissing in the ocean

davet218

Thanks for the input I rarther like the pissing in the sea bit lol. I have 20 of these drives Western Digital Green 2 Tb I have changed all the lights in my house for LED's saving alot of juice. I pay £0.20 or $0.32 per kWh so your $9 is about $336 or £211 even more if you include running the motherboard CPU etc here in the UK electricity isn't cheap any more and going up every year so it all helps saving even a little bit of power.

kind regards

davet218

Shane

If you have one of those little energy meters, you could try plugging the server into it and then trialling drivepool (it has a 30-day trial period).

For whatever it's worth, the biggest saving I found (with my 9-drive machine) was simply turning off the server before I went to bed.

equisetum

I have a system with Homeserver 2011 and six Samsung drives and using Drivepool beta version 5932.

Drivepool will allow drives to go to sleep idle spindown. But of course you have to configure Homeserver for it. It even will spin up only the drive(s) were you are requesting data from all other drives stay idle. So Drivepool is not interfering with the power management set up of the operating system. I am using it in this way already for many months in quite a number of betaversions of Drivepool. 

When all drives are idle my server is consuming 29,5 Wh.

With all drives running its almost 60 Wh. Saving in a year around 260 Kwh. I am paying € 0,22 per Kwh. So thats € 58 in a year. But for me its more important to be as green as realistically possible in energy consumption 

davet218

equisetum

Thank you for your input it is important to me to save energy it also is not an option to shut my server down every night seeing as my work server uploads daily backups at night at 20gb a piece over the internet. My client computers are diskless running CCboot off the network server so i can run three computers off 1 HDD or SSD.

Kind Regards

Trunkton

I had this feature on unraid prior too. Idling 15 HDD's when not in use is also important to me.