Power Management of harddrives connected via USB/SATA controller - on PVE host or guest VM?

[AlpsView]

• I have added an 4 bay SATA HD bay connected to the PVE host via USB3.0.
• Two of these HDs are provided to a VM running OMV via passtrough.
• OVMs integrated power management seems not to work with these two disks. OMV is using smartctl since OMV7. I also tried hd-idle which did not work.

From reading various posts, I got the impression, this could have various causes, mainly the harddisk could not be supporting power management or the USB/SATA controller could not or only partly support the related power management functionality.

In OMV I can see " Adomax Technology Co., Ltd QEMU Tablet" which seems to be a kind of virtual device. Meaing, OMV does not see the controller directly, even on passtrough disks, which adds another layer int he chain who could interfer with proper power management.

This said, is the recomended way to go for USB passtrough disks to configure the power management on the PVE host? Using sdparm or hd-idle and turn all power management off in OVM?

 

[AlpsView]

Seems one if not THE problem is the USB/SATA Bridge/Controller:

JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JMS567 SATA 6Gb/s bridge

This chip obv does not implement power management using ATA commands (what a shame in 2025 - by now, manufacturers should be whipped in public for not implementing such simple and effective power saving methods). Instead it i.e. always reports back "standby", even if you spin your hdd to its max already seeing it glowing in the dark....

And how could power management software work if the controller is delivering wrong information and isn't passing the related ATA commands to the disk. So that's obv. a deadend and the eol of this controller at least in my setup. I should have chosen better...

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Now, if i correctly got it, hd-idle does not work or not only work based on ATA commands? So it might be worth a try to see if I get it working with hd-idle?