Hiya,
I have a bit of a dilemma with my DIY NAS rig. I thought I was being clever by getting the cheapest 8TB seagates in existence for a RAIDZ1 pool, but I have to conclude they’re Fucking NoisyTM. I’m very sensitive to the noise, unable to relocate the rig further away from my sleeping space and I never need the spinning drives at night anyway.
I run Proxmox with the drives passed through to a TrueNAS VM. I’m willing to turn this setup upside down to get a super convenient way to put the drives to sleep and wake them up exactly when I want to. Heck, I’ll write my own webapp to do it if I need to, but I rather ask around first because this has to be a reoccurring thing.
I know it’s possible to put drives to sleep with Linux. I know it reduces their lifespan and I don’t care, I need to sleep. :) I’m unsure how exactly it should be done when the drives are passed through to a VM.
Do you put your drives to sleep? What tricks have you used to achieve this conveniently? Let me know!
E: Should have clarified, but there are other, SSD-backed services on the same machine that need to stay online regardless of what is going on with the spinning drives.
E2: Thanks all! Ended up dismantling the VM disk passthrough setup and going with hd-idle for now. It does what it says on the tin and even works nicely together with smartmontools even though it warned against it. Still need to setup network shares via LXC and recreate all the snapshot tasks I had going on in TrueNAS. But that’s non-urgent. I may well also look into better insulation soon, the case is indeed not ideal as it is right now.
First of all, a NAS VM is generally considered a bad idea that has been discussed before so I won’t repeat it here.
Anything using those drives is going to keep them awake. Usually, NAS software runs background tasks, as does proxmox. You’ll have to identify and schedule them to shut down during sleep hours.
But that’s going to be a huge pain, because eventually you’ll find it’s gone to sleep when you haven’t, and you want access. I’d see if you could configure proxmox to suspend the VMs and put the whole thing to sleep when you push the power button.
I’ll gladly take the advice on the NAS VM, I see so many tutorials virtualising TrueNAS and not a lot of the opposite viewpoint. If it’s not a good practice I’d indeed rather recycle that setup while I’m at it.
I don’t need to keep using Proxmox, or TrueNAS for that matter. If I need to DIY this with bare metal Debian, I will. My constraint is to have both always-on services and on-demand HDD backed services on the same machine. Sky is the limit after that…
Scheduling doesn’t sound the best indeed, which is why I’d ideally want a simple button that I can click from a GUI.
I had a longer reply typed out, but I guess the network ate it. The gist was to consider a second low power device for the always on services that don’t need the big noisy storage.
I currently have exactly this setup but I really want to migrate to a single machine :)
I think it’s mostly advised against virtualizing because of problems with virtual filesystems, passing through your drives eliminats most reasons against it. I think this thread links most of the points. I think it was also in TrueNAS docs, but I can’t find it rn.
https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/absolutely-must-virtualize-truenas-a-guide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.212/
Thanks - from what I see myu CPU doesn’t support VT-d, only VT-x, which at a glance makes it not suitable for passing through these drives safely. I’ll get to dismantling the NAS VM setup actually.