Exos power management on SCALE

TrueNAS General
1

Good day,

I’m on SCALE 24.04.2. Despite the warnings I decided to go for 5x8 TB Exos 7E8 drives (ST8000NM000A-2KE101). They are very noisy. My apartment is small, and my NAS mainly servers as an archiving solution. I’m fine with having the drives spin down for the sake of silence.

The TrueNAS GUI settings are APM-based, which these drives don’t support.

I downloaded openSeaChest 24.08 and ran openSeachest_PowerControl -d /dev/sda --showEPCSettings:

695×271 6.47 KB

According to these settings, a spindown should happen after 10 minutes (6000x100/1000 ms). This is definitely not the case.

Am I missing something? Is there anything that could keep the drives from reaching the spindown state?

2

First - where is the system dataset - if its on the HDD’s then the pool will never power down

3

Hey, thanks for replying.

That might be the issue, I only have one dataset:

1095×304 11.1 KB

How do I migrate the system dataset to my boot drive (sdd)?

4
1 Like
5

According to those settings, my system dataset is already on a storage pool that doesn’t use my HDDs:

grafik

1 Like
6

This is my pool which i’m trying to put on standby, notice my boot ssd (/dev/sdd) is missing. It’s definitely in the boot-pool since that one doesnt show up in the overview.

grafik
grafik1113×707 18.7 KB

7

Then its not writes to the system dataset that is causing the issue. Thats the first thing to look at.

Historically, getting disks to power down has met with limited success. Someone who has suceeded may be able to help - I have never tried.

There is / was a script somwhere that some have had some sucess with. Not sure where it has got to these days

8

I have no issue with trying to find out what’s keeping the drives from cycling through their power states properly. I’m also looking for ways to do that. Unfortunately, iotop doesn’t seem to be available.

9

@Jisifus
Where did you download openSeaChest? I could only find the source…

I myself have exact the same problem. My 8 Seagate ST3000NM0023 do not cycle through their powerstates. Once I had it running, and I could see the “Additional sense: Idle condition activated by timer” when checking the power state.
But after configuring the drives according to my needs the timers are not running anymore.
Thats the configuration:

root@truenas[/mnt/EBN_APPS/NAS_Tools/Tools/SeaChest]# sdparm --flexible -6 -p po -l /dev/sda               
    /dev/sda: SEAGATE   ST3000NM0023      0006
    Direct access device specific parameters: WP=0  DPOFUA=1
Power condition [po] mode page:
  PM_BG         0  [cha: n, def:  0, sav:  0]  Power management, background functions, precedence
  STANDBY_Y     0  [cha: y, def:  0, sav:  0]  Standby_y timer enable
  IDLE_C        1  [cha: y, def:  0, sav:  1]  Idle_c timer enable
  IDLE_B        1  [cha: y, def:  1, sav:  1]  Idle_b timer enable
  IDLE_A        1  [cha: y, def:  1, sav:  1]  Idle_a timer enable
  STANDBY_Z     1  [cha: y, def:  0, sav:  1]  Standby_z timer enable
  IACT          10  [cha: y, def: 10, sav: 10]  Idle_a condition timer (100 ms)
  SZCT          9000  [cha: y, def:9000, sav:9000]  Standby_z condition timer (100 ms)
  IBCT          3000  [cha: y, def:3000, sav:3000]  Idle_b condition timer (100 ms)
  ICCT          6000  [cha: y, def:6000, sav:6000]  Idle_c condition timer (100 ms)
  SYCT          6000  [cha: y, def:6000, sav:6000]  Standby_y condition timer (100 ms)
  CCF_IDLE      1  [cha: y, def:  1, sav:  1]  check condition if from idle_c
  CCF_STAND     1  [cha: y, def:  1, sav:  1]  check condition if from a standby
  CCF_STOPP     2  [cha: y, def:  2, sav:  2]  check condition if from stopped
10

I found an interresting thread about this topic.
https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest/issues/117