Mdadm RAID 1 power save

[dennnic]

Hello,

Found a very informative guide on how to set up and auto-mount a raid1 volume, based on 2 hdd, of course.
It seems to be working fine, someone on "pcsteps" wrote a very foolproof article, I'd like to thank him for it, if he ever reads this thread.

However, if mounted, the drives are active all the time. There is no power save option, or spin down, or anything similar, none that I can find, at least. When I manually unmount the volume using disks (gnome disk utility?), the two drives do shut down eventually, after predetermined time. Unfortunately, volume then needs to be manually mounted again.

Since the OS is installed on a third drive (ssd), raid1 volume would be used strictly as a data storage and it wouldn't be needed roughly 80% of the time the PC is on.

Is anyone aware of an in-between option - always mounted (or, at least, a shortcut shown on desktop), but powering off when not used? I don't mind the "latency", waiting for a half a minute every time is fine, as long as it extends the life of my drives.


Thanks ahead,
Regards,
Stefan

[Mute Ant]

Leave them mounted and talk to the drive hardware. As soon as Linux needs to access something in the RAID they will spin up again...
sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sda ; sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdb

[dennnic]

It won't do the trick. They come back online the same moment I issue the command. There must be something using them all the time.

[dennnic]

Anyone? Can someone, maybe, move the thread somewhere, where it's gonna be read more often?

[catweazel]

I don't mind the "latency", waiting for a half a minute every time is fine, as long as it extends the life of my drives.

Drives are best left powered up. Spinning up a HDD induces torsion stress in the drive spindle, which promotes failure. Power cycles are counted by the drive's firmware (SMART) precisely because once they reach a certain threshold they shorten the life of the drive, which is the exact opposite of what you wish to achieve.

[dennnic]

Drives are best left powered up. Spinning up a HDD induces torsion stress in the drive spindle, which promotes failure. Power cycles are counted by the drive's firmware (SMART) precisely because once they reach a certain threshold they shorten the life of the drive, which is the exact opposite of what you wish to achieve.

Even if it meant leaving them on for 10 hours straight every day?

[catweazel]

Drives are best left powered up. Spinning up a HDD induces torsion stress in the drive spindle, which promotes failure. Power cycles are counted by the drive's firmware (SMART) precisely because once they reach a certain threshold they shorten the life of the drive, which is the exact opposite of what you wish to achieve.

Even if it meant leaving them on for 10 hours straight every day?

Even if it means leaving them on 24x365.

[dennnic]

Thank you for your answer! Will do just that.