Can you guys share your experience with disk sleep on the Helios64 + Armbian.

In my case I haven't seen the disks sleep - they are always spinning (or so they seem) and never on standby.

I have a standalone /dev/sda and a RAID5 array with disks /dev/sd[b-e] (created with mdadm) - and XFS formatted logical volumes on top of these.

 

• 'iotop' says that nothing is accessing the disks:

• 'hdparm -B /dev/sd[a-z]' after each reboot is always:

sudo hdparm -B /dev/sd[a-e]

/dev/sda:
 APM_level	= 254

/dev/sdb:
 APM_level	= off

/dev/sdc:
 APM_level	= off

/dev/sdd:
 APM_level	= off

/dev/sde:
 APM_level	= off

• 'hdparm -C /dev/sd[a-z]' is always:

$ sudo hdparm -B /dev/sd[a-e]

/dev/sda:
 APM_level	= 254

/dev/sdb:
 APM_level	= off

/dev/sdc:
 APM_level	= off

/dev/sdd:
 APM_level	= off

/dev/sde:
 APM_level	= off

• Added a rule to set power management parameters and it seems to be ignored

$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/99-hdd-pwm.rules
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTRS{queue/rotational}=="1", RUN+="/usr/bin/hdparm -B 63 -S 120 /dev/%k"

 

@SIGSEGV Which HDD brand and model are you using ?

 

https://withblue.ink/2016/07/15/what-i-learnt-from-using-wd-red-disks-to-build-a-home-nas.html

 

Quote

On Linux, the traditional way to control disk standby (and power management) is to use hdparm; however, hdparm will not work with WD Red drives, because the firmware of the disks doesn’t support that

 

sda: Seagate BarraCuda ST2000DM006-2DM164

sd[b-e]: Toshiba DT01ACA100

I think Toshiba the APM settings are volatile, so yes you need something to set it up at every startup.

 

hdparm path is on Debian : /usr/sbin/hdparm

 

 

 

I send my  disks to sleep with the following hdparm.service script:

 

# cat /etc/systemd/system/hdparm.service
[Unit]
Description=hdparm sleep

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/hdparm -q -S 60 -y /dev/sda
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/hdparm -q -S 60 -y /dev/sdb
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/hdparm -q -S 60 -y /dev/sdc
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/hdparm -q -S 60 -y /dev/sdd
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/hdparm -q -S 60 -y /dev/sde

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

 

15 hours ago, gprovost said:

@SIGSEGV Which HDD brand and model are you using ?

 

https://withblue.ink/2016/07/15/what-i-learnt-from-using-wd-red-disks-to-build-a-home-nas.html

 

 

Interesting find... I wonder if this impacts WD Red Pro.

@privilegejunkie what specific model? My guess is that the answer is no, though. That's a relatively old article and the WD utility mentioned there only applies to old Red drives that are 4TB and below. For WD drives that support IDLE3, you can try to use idle3ctl (apt install idle3-tools) to manage their idle setting. I've turned idle3 off on all my drives because they're usually idle for, at most 5 minutes leading to constant sleep/wake.

On 11/18/2020 at 7:38 AM, gprovost said:

@SIGSEGV Which HDD brand and model are you using ?

 

https://withblue.ink/2016/07/15/what-i-learnt-from-using-wd-red-disks-to-build-a-home-nas.html

 

to my knowledge this affects only older wd-red's