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.

  • Sleepkever@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    The usual trick is hdparm I guess? For me with a 8 disk raidz2 pool I found that playing a movie from that might put it to sleep between reads, because the longest timeout is a bit short. I’ve been using hd-idle with a 30 minuten timeout because of that for quite a few years already which has worked quite nice for me.

    The only issue I’ve run into is that smart data reads count as activity, so make sure that any smart data software has a long timeout between reads and is configured to not wake disks.