Preventing HDD spindown

[Briain]

Hi all,
We have tested a TS-639 Pro and disabled the HDD standby function. It would not enter hibernation after 2 hours.
Please provide remote access for us so we can check it further.

Thanks

Jason

Hi Jason

With mine, after disabling spin-down the green LED remains lit, but they still spin down; you can actually hear the disks spin up when you access it.

Have you also observed the SMART start-stop counter on your test NAS (with spin-down disabled)? On mine (with spin-down disabled) it clocked up >50 per day (likely a lot more if I left it to its own devices; I observed it clocking up several counts in a minute at one stage). I don't think it's actually spinning down and up fully for each of these events, but something very odd is happening. It seems others have observed the same issue so it seems pretty consistent.

If you don't observe the above SMART issue on your 639, please let me know and I'll happily set up your access to my own 659. I presume you'll need port forwarding set up in the router to get at it; let me know what's required and I'll set it up. Please also let me know when, as I'm not keen on leaving it in that state (i.e. clocking up SMART counts) for very long.

Bri

NB I'm using 4 x HE103UJ in RAID 6, but I noticed this issue as soon as I got the NAS (after fitting a single disk). When I first tried setting for no spin-down, I found that the green LED remained illuminated, but I could hear the disks spin up when I accessed it. Once I found that was happening and that the SMART counter was going crazy, I switched back to 1 h spin down and haven't changed it since. It would be good to find a way to keep it spinning.

[m0x]

Hi,

After upgrading to 3.2.6, I have to withdraw the "solution" I posted earlier (hdparm -S0 /dev/hdx). Instead, I can now confirm the same unpredictable spindown issues as anyone else.

System: TS-459 Pro, 4x Samsung HD154UI, firmware 3.2.6 Build 0423T

Standby has been disabled in the web interface, yet the drives spin down about 10 to 15 times per day. This is the best I can do. Start_Stop_Count is now 750+ for all four drives, with about 1700 Power_On_Hours. I also noticed this weird behaviour when I was still running 3.2.4 so I upgraded to 3.2.6, to no avail.

Turning off standby for each HDD with hdparm seemed to work to some extent in 3.2.4, but upgrading to 3.2.6 has actually made things worse. Hdparm -S0 now makes the drives go on and off once every minute or so. Very odd.

SMB, FTP and SSH are currently the only network services I have enabled. All applications are off too, so no Twonkymedia or whatever.

I understand that HDDs are supposed to last for several 100,000s start/stops, yet it is annoying me, as it appears to be a firmware bug. I will be happy to provide any further info to help solving this issue.

Regards,
Erwin

[Briain]

Hi Folks

More observations:

I'm finding that when set to spin-down (hibernate) it spins up regularly even without anything on the network (i.e. it spins up and down several times during the night). Last night, I set it with the download station disabled and I'm not sure that it hibernated at all. If it did, it certainly didn't clock up the SMART stats so that could be another issue; I'll monitor that setup more closely going forwards. With download station enabled (i.e. when it did hibernate) I also found that in addition to random spin-ups, starting any Windows (XP SP3) PC on the same subnet caused the Qnap to spin up. I'm referring to PC's that have never accessed the Qnap (so no mapped drives and no share paths remembered in Windows 'Network Neighborhood'). Overall, the whole disk power management system seems to be very buggy.

Of course, it's a lot worse with hibernation disabled as though the green LED remains lit, it actually spins down after only a few minutes (I can hear it doing so) then when spun up again (by having a PC on the network) it increments the SMART Start_Stop_Count (often once a minute); in other words, with hibernation set off it goes completely nuts.

I did email Qnap support about this (four weeks ago) but as yet I have had no response. I appreciate Jason offering to help on the forum, but it would be better to hear that Qnap are officially investigating this on one of their own (X59 series) NAS's to at least acknowledge whether they can observe the issue, and assuming that they can, then update us on whether they will be able to resolve this problem in the next FW build. I have a standard build on my NAS with absolutely everything (apart from Twonky 5.1.4) disabled*, so I would think that it's easy enough for Qnap to replicate the fault in one of their factory R&D NAS's.

At the end of the day, I need to either have a way to stop hibernation, or if hibernation has to be used, I at least need it to actually work (i.e. stay hibernated). Ky key issue is that I really don't like this continuous disk cycling and if I'd found out about this issue in advance, I would certainly not have bought this product (at least until hearing it had been fully resolved).

Can somebody from Qnap please comment on whether there is anything being done to officially investigate this issue as there seems to be a wall of silence from the official support route?

I'm very sorry to go on about this, but I really do need to know whether any of this can even be observed on Qnap's support NAS's and thus whether it's likely to be fixed, or whether I should consider returning the unit as faulty. I'm happy(ish) to wait for the next firmware release, but that's only if someone can assume me that the problem will be resolved in that release (or even just an acknowledge that the problem has been identified and thus that its at least under investigation).

* When testing, note the latest observation about the download station in paragraph 1

Kind regards
Bri

[QNAPJason]

Hi Bri,
Thanks for the note. Last week we did some tests and did not find this issue.
This & next week week we will perform more in-depth investigation in the lab about this HDD spin-down/up issue

Jason

[Briain]

Hi

No worries; it's fantastic to hear that it's being investigated. I'll observe it over the next few days (with download station disabled) and see if that's somehow stopped it hibernating (I'd be happy with that for now) or whether it's just somehow stopped the SMART counts from being incremented; either way, it's a somewhat unexpected change.

Incidentally, with hibernation in general, it might be useful for you to know that with Twonky 5.1.4 on a ReadyNAS Duo, you can start the control point and open containers (menu items) without spinning up the disks! It's only when you open something that requests the album covers (shows the art) that it spins the disks up. The Qnap fires up as soon as you disturb anything on the network (a PC being switched on) or as soon as a control point is opened up on a PDA (i.e. not actually to the stage of browsing any Twonky containers; just started up). I'm just typing this to let you know that there's no Twonky-related hibernation problem that I can see (in case that helps you with other queries about lack of hibernation; as opposed to mine about how I can stop hibernation from happening at all); Twonky menu (on other NAS's) seems to correctly reside in memory (until artwork has been requested necessitating it to then call from its disk cache).

Bri

[QNAPJason]

Hi,
Thanks for the comments. Our engineers have found the issue regarding HDD spin down even after disabling HDD Standby.
We will provide a fix via firmware update.

Jason

[Briain]

Hi

That is absolutely fantastic news! Thank you very much indeed for the update!

Bri

[novafox]

It's been one and a half years and this problem is still not fixed. I'm running a TS-259 Pro with firmware v3.5.1, hard disk standby mode is disabled, and yet several times a day, the HDDs spin down while the green LEDs remain lit. I want the disks to spin continuously. When will this bug be fixed?

[Scillonian]

Noticed this today on my TS-459 Pro+ after restarting following an automatic shutdown due to a power outage. (Unit is connected to a UPS so was a controlled shutdown.) Before the shutdown disk were not spinning down. After the restart the disks were spinning down. I have cycled the spindown option and that sofar seem to have stopped the disks spinning down.

[novafox]

I have cycled the spindown option and that sofar seem to have stopped the disks spinning down.

Yes, I tried that, too, but it didn't help in my case. Based on this list, what's mostly keeping my disks spinning is probably (5) Share folder mapping. However, I'd prefer the hard disk standby mode setting to actually do what it says it does.

[reinier]

Hi all,

To Qnap:
Is this issue adressed in the new firmware ?

I have 2 TS-1079Pro models with 10 disks each. After a while it spins down, allthough I disabled power management.
When it tries to spin up from idle, you hear 1 disk spinup, and immidiately it reboots. Both devices behave identical. Firmware: 3.5.2.

Any suggestions ?


With kind regards,

Reinier

[P3R]

Is this issue adressed in the new firmware ?

The thread is ancient so most likely it was fixed at that point. It may have been reintroduced (I had this problem at one time) and possibly fixed again?

When it tries to spin up from idle, you hear 1 disk spinup, and immidiately it reboots.

With a real problem like this I wouldn't worry about unwanted spin downs. Something is seriously wrong in your installations so you'd better fix it before this breaks something else!

I would recommend that you contact Qnap support for assistance in solving this problem.
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