VM Unraid - HD Discs not spinning up

[chrischambers]

for background info - I just upgraded from a SATA expansion card to a LSI HBA card using the following setup. installed the Fujitsu 9300-8I SAS 12G SATA 6G PCI-e Controller HBA IT mode and with the help of some of the members I was able to get my VM to see and use the Hard discs, reference Link

but at the time I didn't know the following.

so a quick ran few my setup

nano /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet amd_iommu=on iommu=pt pcie_acs_override=downstream,multifunction"

nano /etc/modules

vfio
vfio_iommu_type1
vfio_pci
vfio_virqfd

then I added the card to unraid



and I also change the Machine from I440FX to Q35

here is the proxmox settings





and once I had the hard drivers plug, I fired up my unraid and assigned the drivers to the right location. so far so good

so here is the problem, I have set my Hard Discs to spin down after 15 mins of none use, but when I try and access a share folder, I have discovered that the discs are not spinning up, and when log onto unraid and manual try and spin up the discs, then nothing happens, and when I try and access the share via windows explorer my windows hangs and then resets the windows environment.0

is they any other settings that I have missed, as it looks like the SAS has read / write access but not Full control over the hard discs as it is not able to spin then up.

 

[Kingneutron]

> so here is the problem, I have set my Hard Discs to spin down after 15 mins of none use

Yeah maybe don't do that - you're running a server, not a desktop.

If you're worried about power usage, consolidate into fewer/larger disks and just let them spin. And make sure everything is on UPS power.

 

[chrischambers]

> so here is the problem, I have set my Hard Discs to spin down after 15 mins of none use

Yeah maybe don't do that - you're running a server, not a desktop.

If you're worried about power usage, consolidate into fewer/larger disks and just let them spin. And make sure everything is on UPS power.

the question at the moment is not the power I am using it is the wear and tear of the hard drivers with the heads going back and four, and not in use. but I am confused on why Unraid is not able to spin up the discs. ( I understand Unraid is out of scope here ) but am I passing through all the right information to the unraid VM ?

and regarding the second point. I am looking at get a UPS to protect the server.

 

[Kingneutron]

If you use NAS-rated disks (especially with ZFS) they're specced for 24/7 use and usually have a 5-year warranty

 

[chrischambers]

the discs I have mainly are WD RED 4TB and shucked White 10TB and at the moment the format is XFS

 

[Kingneutron]

Hmm, WD Red went SMR a couple of years ago, so you should be wary of performance slowdowns. Red Pros should be OK, but I stopped buying WD entirely over their shenanigans and difficulties with RMA

SMR is famously bad, if you want to swap those disks out down the road I can recommend Ironwolf and Toshiba.

Modern hard drives are designed for fairly heavy use (except for desktop-class, those are only rated for ~8 hours a day operation in a "typical" home or business environment) - don't overthink "wear and tear on the heads." The WDIDLE scandal was years ago and hasn't been a problem for some time.

Hard drives are going to die, possibly at any time. The more important thing is to have backups, preferably with redundancy, and try to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule for critical data. And put everything on UPS power.