Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

WikiGoblin 19 Sep 2009 04:15

I have a 2TB My Book World Edition II and I rarely access the data on it but I notice the drive spins up every few hours and then goes back to sleep mode after 15 minutes. Is this normal? Is there any way to tell what is causing it?

I do have Twonky set up but I have it set to update the database manually. Also I used to map drives on my Vista machine but I noticed it would cause the drive to spin up every time I booted up my computer so I removed the drive mappings.

I'm a little concerned of the wear and tear on the drives from the constant spin up/spin down cycles and I asked a friend who has a non WD NAS and he said his NAS never comes out of sleep mode unless he accesses it.

Thanks for any info.

Re: Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

frater 19 Sep 2009 05:51

This may be a side-effect of the cron daemon which gets enabled if you run my prep_whitelight script.
It's a side effect because the log of the cron-daemon can not be turned off.

Have you run prep_whitelight?
If so and if you do not need cron you can just turn it off with this command:

chmod -x /opt/etc/init.d/S10cron

Re: Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

WikiGoblin 19 Sep 2009 06:35

Actually I haven't modified the device beyond modifying some out of the box settings (like disabling the white light). So I take it coming out of standby several times a day is not normal?

Re: Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

mad_ady 28 Sep 2009 18:38

Frater - it would be more interesting (and maybe more energy efficient) if you made an option in your prep_whitelight script to create a ramdrive (of about 2M) which would be automatically mounted at startup and would keep all the logs. Then cron would have to run logrotate periodically to keep this ramdrive from filling up (it would be risky if a process would spit out lots of debug messages). This way, processes that have non-interesting logs (e.g. cups, cron) would use the ramdrive.

If you like, I can try to create such a ramdrive and see if it works…

Re: Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

tomas123 01 Oct 2009 11:20

@WikiGoblin
I have the same problem.
You can see the Start_Stop_Count of the disc with telnet:

~ # /usr/sbin/smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [arm-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   162   158   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       6900
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   096   096   000    Old_age   Always       -       4813
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   095   095   000    Old_age   Always       -       3789
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       48
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       4
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   199   199   000    Old_age   Always       -       4813
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   115   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       35
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0

After my Start_Stop_Count goes to 5000 in 4 Month (an my smart healt value from 100% to 96%) I searched for the real causes ( www.wireshark.org ):

In my windows network same computers are very chatty and cyclic wake up the mybook. I changed the workgroup name of the white book to another workgroup name.

I also killed this start scripts:

~ # ls -l /etc/init.d/backup/
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         3342 Mar  4  2009 S97twonkyserver
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           21 Jan  1  1970 S9iTune -> /etc/init.d/_SK9iTune
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         1300 Mar  4  2009 S9mDNSResponder

Now I have only 2 unattended startups daily. I think, this are the internal wix… daemons. (type ps in commandline)

Re: Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

mad_ady 03 Oct 2009 13:10

Interesting results…

Just one question: are these counters reset when the box resets (or looses power?). To me, it seems they aren't, because I have an uptime of 8 days and:
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 097 097 000 Old_age Always - 2210
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1391

Anyway, it's a nice way of monitoring how often the hard drive has started… Thanks for your input.

Re: Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

tomas123 03 Oct 2009 19:38

no reset at power off - see further infos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Re: Hard disks spin up when not being used throughout the day

WikiGoblin 07 Oct 2009 04:59

Ever since I switched from JBOD to the Mirrored RAID and removed all media from Twonky I haven't noticed the drives spinning up anymore. I also turned the light back on.. though I plan on turning that off again soon.

Thanks for the info @tomas123 I'll definitely take a look if the drives appear to spin up again.