Drive Spin-Down on a Pro 6. Can it really work?

[roveer]

I'm setting up my pro 6 and am considering enabling drive spin-down. The thought of all those drives spinning all the time seems a little wasteful. There will likely be large periods of time where there will be no NAS activity. I'll put the NAS on a UPS and configure it for shutdown on power failure.

The Pro 6 will be used to house my media library. Music & Video served via mapped drives and the DLNA server. This NAS will also be the target of nightly backups from my office computer. I'm wondering how the NAS will respond when a computer tries to copy to it when it's spun down? Does it start to cache the data while it starts up the drives? How is the DLNA server affected by drive spindown?

Anyone have a pro's & con's discussion about this and make a determination to not use this option or has anyone determined that it works great? I've never had good luck with drive spin-down or sleep options. Something always seems to go wrong.

[mtakacs]

There was a questions somewhere on the forums (found it. -tak) where he was reporting 8 second "spin-up" times accessing his shared media on the Duo v2. I've got an NV+ v2 and I think I'm seeing that delay as well.

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=59376

I've also been wondering how that's supposed to work when I want to write to the drive or do a DLNA media request

I'd be happy to learn it works "well" and caches/buffers the write / request until the drives spin up.

-mark

[roveer]

I'm going to experiment with it for both of my needs, DLNA and file copy before I build my final configuration. I'll post back results of what I find out. Sure would be nice to save some energy and wear and tear.

Roveer

[TeknoJnky]

as far as my experience, there is no read/write caching during spin up, regardless if you are trying to read or write, your app will wait (sometimes appearing as 'hung') until the nas responds with the requested data read/write. The same thing happens when you have spin down on your PC hardrives.

[AMRivlin]

Quick question: What's the point? I think spin up and spin down would cause more wear than just running it all the time.
My electricity costs 8 cents/kWh. so running the readynas pro6 24/7 365 = $60 (.08cost*82w*24*365/1000)

I don't mean to sound snobbish, but $5 a month is hardly a major expense considering the expense of the device.

[TeknoJnky]

$5 a month is hardly a major expense considering the expense of the device.

agreed. but of course other areas of the world have more expensive energy

I don't know if its possible, but personally I am more paranoid of drives spinning up out of sync (or failing to wake up at all) and causing the array to rebuild or worse lose data.