I’ve finished building my NAS and backup plan. I’m running Electric Eel.
I have a whole SSD raid and I have an external HDD (which I plan to store at another place physically), which I will import/export every time I need to update. I also have a WD Red on a docking station connected by USB3, which I plan to keep connected and run a scheduled replication task every week.
I don’t want the connected HDD to keep spinning when it’s doing nothing to save power, so I turned on power management to turn it off quickly after it’s done using. That works fine.
Here is my problem, when I login to TrueNAS or go to the dashboard, it’s really slow, because it starts the HDD which was idle to query information on it. Is there any way to avoid that? I don’t really want to query the drive every time I log in there since it’s just a backup drive, but I don’t want to mount/unmount it manually every time I need to back it up.
If I understand, you are using the WD Red USB drive for backup. If it is a ZFS backup, you can export the volume after replication and import before replication. If it’s another type of backup, you can mount and unmount it. When not mounted (or exported), the drive spinup will not happen.
I replicate as one of my 4 backups to an external USB ZFS drive and I do exactly what I said above. It does not spin up.
Of course to do so, you’ll need a script depending on your exact needs. That is how you avoid manually mounting/importing/exporting. You script a before backup, and after backup. In that way, as you sound like you noted, it does not spin up. So, you’ll need a shell script. While I do I have one myself, it’s not likely at all what you want as it uses zfs-autobackup, and has a bunch of rotation type logic as I have more than one backup set for that particular backup. It will not be useful to you, maybe someone else has one or you can learn a little shell scripting.
