NASLite Network Attached Storage

My MB has options like HD spin down and I was wondering if anyone has tried using power saving or HD spind down options with NASLite?

I haven't see a disk spin down with NL yet...

I played around with most of the BIOS power saving options. If I enable the suspend modes, I have problems and cannot log back in using telnet or HTTP. I left the HDD spin down enabled and do not see problems but Im not sure the BIOS is actually spinning down the disks. Not sure how to check this either.

Guess you're learning why real world servers don't have power save once the server hardware suspends, there is no way for the server software to recognise your request and respond to it.

You could theoretically use Wake On Lan, and send a wake up packet to power the server back on, assuming your hardware supports WOL

I'd like to throw my 2 cents here and request 2 power saving features features:

- I'd like to see the ability for the drives to spin down after a configurable length of time. As a home user that intends using NAS primarily for backup and some general purpose file storage, I can see long periods of time where the NAS box isn't being accessed. Yes there will be a delay while the drive spins up but my limited testing with this feature in FreeNAS shows that Windows doesn't seem to care. Windows justs wait until the drives spin up and doesn't give any errors.

- I also like FreeNAS's ability to schedule a shutdown. There's no reason for the NAS box to be humming away while I'm sleeping or at work. Combined with a wake-on-lan feature the NAS box can be placed anywhere in the house and still save power.

Here's something for you to try.

Create a Microsoft Access database on whatever NAS server you have handy, open the database and append a few records and then leave the database open and allow the NAS box to spindown/suspend/whatever - try to close the database AFTER the NAS server has spundown/suspended/whatever and tell me how Microsoft Access responds - I'm betting it freezes and you lose whatever data was entered, since the last time the database was closed.

If, as a home user, you feel the need to have the NAS server shutdown to save power, then by all means telnet into it and shut it down, and when you need it again - WOL the box and wait for it to spin up - these require no change in NASLite - all you need to do is make sure the hardware you choose supports WOL.

Im using Netgear GA311 in an IBM Intellistation 621420U and WOL works great. For some reason did not work on onboard 10/100 ethernet.

I think many 9 till 5 small businesses would also like their drives to spin down so they are not running for the 128 hours a week while they are not working. A configurable spin down time sounds like a very good idea, then if you want to use it do, if it does not suit your application then don't.

I use Hitachi drives in my two NAS boxes because by using the Hitachi Feature Tool I can configure these drives to spin down automatically when not in use. OK, it makes them a little bit sluggish to start up when needed but you can play around with the settings so that they don't spin down too soon. As both of my NAS boxes are only used intermittantly this works well for me. YMMV! And I seem to recall that Hitachi quote an expected life of something like 300,000 stop/starts.

So what exactly is there that prevents these small businesses from switching at off at 5 and back on at 9 - that would also save them the power consumption of the CPU.

Yes small businesses and individuals could manually shutdown their NAS server everyday, as long as the person tasked to do it doesn't forget and hasn't taken the day off. I normally turn my PC at night. If I forget to also turn the NAS off first then I either leave it run or turn my PC back on just to turn off the NAS.

Maybe a business wants to run a backup at the end of the week and then shutdown afterward. Does it make sense for someone to stick around until it's done? In my case I have the NAS mirror the drives after I go to bed. I'd like it to shut off after it's done rather than run another 18 or 20 hours until I might use it again.

What's wrong with having an OPTIONAL automatic shutdown? Maybe at a certain time, maybe after completion of mirroring???

Summarizing the two positions I've seen on this forum:

1. First group wants some options within this area - even if they aren't perfect or even well behaved.

2. Second group chides first group for even considering a path which might sacrifice reliability: "How dare you even *think* of that?"


Let's just hope that Tony and Ralph can satisfy both groups without antagonizing either

I'm willing to forgo my request to have the drives spin down as that does add more startup cycles, negatively affecting the long term reliability. While I didn't have any problems waiting for the disks to startup with FreeNAS, I'm willing to admit that there could be scenarios where problems occur. Fordem gave one scenario (I didn't try it as I don't have a FreeNAS box anymore).

I still like the scheduled shut down idea, though.

I am new to the world of NAS, but I second the motion to provide an option to enable spin-down.

I'm using the NAS for general media storage, and although 'on' 24/7, it is only being accessed whilst I need the media, thus a few hours per day.

Any feature to save energy would be very welcome, even if it adds a few seconds to spin up the drives.

I have been using both NASLite and FreeNAS over the last year.

Each with 2.5TB on them with 8 drives each, each booting off USB thumm.

I use the NAS boxes to store video mainly with a few hundred gig of music.

I like the FreeNAS because it has user access controls and can spin down individual drives after a configurable time of inactivity.

I have the FreeNAS drives set to spindown after 5 minutes of inactivity and it shutsdown automatically at 1am and powers back up (through BIOS Setting) at 3pm in the afternoon so Music/Videos are available after work. If needed earlier press the button on the front of the machine. Spinning up the drive added less than 5 seconds to the 10 seconds it took WizD to read all the files in the folders, so it was not a problem

Using WizD on an Ubuntu box, the family browse the video library spread over three machine, NASLite/FreeNAs and Ubuntu.

As much as I love the power saving in FreeNAS I have this weekend standardised on NASLite.

FreeNAS just crashed too often.... Usually when trying to add another drive or a USB drive, each time it rebooted after a crash it would insist on fscking every drive. That would take 2 hours.

So NasLite it is...