pvestatd doesn't let HDDs go to sleep

MisterY

Well-Known Member
Oct 10, 2016
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Hi,

I got Proxmox running on my homeserver. Because I don't need the VM with my storage hdds (passtroughed to the VM) much often, I would like to spindown these hdds when they're not used.
I tried hdparm and hd-idle, but both are not able to spindown the hdds. Even if I try to spindown them manually by hdparm -Y /dev/sdx they spindown, but starting after a half second again.

The problem is pvestatd.

I hear about two possible solutions:
- install Debian and then Proxmox --> another user told me that this doesn't solve the problem
- deactivate pvestatd. I don't like to do that, because I would like to see the CPU, RAM, Network and HDD Graphs in the webgui.

Is it possible to prevent pvestatd reading disk states when they're idling??

Here are the same problems:
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pvestatd-awakes-hdd-immediately.15344/
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/hdd-standby.11836/
 
Last edited:
A bit of a necro to an old post - but it really is a problem that pvestatd actually reads data from your drives and does this so aggressively.

As noted by the OP, it prevents drives from going idle using tools like hd-idle. Some will argue to benefit of idling your drives, but if the user wants to do this there is no good reason for something like pvestatd to get in the way.

More troubling to me, I've recently confirmed that this also prevents drives with active power management (e.g., WD Reds) from ever entering their low-power states. pvestatd reads from them so often that they run in high power mode all the time. Its also silly that this happens on drives that have nothing to do with the PVE services running on the host.

There are ways to stat the drives without spinning them. pvestatd could reasonably function and not create unnecessary power management problems on the host.
 
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I agree completely with this post.

I also have disks that are nothing to do with pve, yet there's no way of asking the core to ignore them
 
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For me it worked to exclude them in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf by adding r|/dev/sdX[/code] to [icode] global_filter like this:

Code:
global_filter = [ "r|/dev/zd.*|", "r|/dev/mapper/pve-.*|" "r|/dev/mapper/.*-(vm|base)--[0-9]+--disk--[0-9]+|" "r|/dev/sda" "r|/dev/sdd"]
sda and sdd are frin a ZFS pool, not used in Proxmox. After adding the filter and re-booting, the drives could go to sleep.
 
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