Disk spin down with Storage Spaces

[SaTiGrrrr]

Hey there,

i have a small Homeserver based on Supermicro X10SDV-4C-TLN4F and want to get rid of may Raid Controller to save some power. So i thought going with storage spaces seems to be a good thing as i don't need that much speed. I just want to run 2x10TB WD Reds in a mirror. But unfortunately the drives don't spin down. If i use Intel RSTe with Raid 1 everything is working fine and the drives spin down after several minutes. Does Storage spaces support Spin Down at all? If yes what could be the reason that the drives don't spin down.
Beside from that is there any way to see if a drive is in spin down mode with windows?
Thx for your help!

 

[cesmith9999]

Storage spaces does not support disk spin down.

Chris

 

[svond]

Bullshit @chris.
Why are you posting this?

 

[Captain Lukey]

Knooooob : You can try setting Power Options > Advanced settings > Hard disk > Turn off hard disk after (minutes) in Windows. ?? If your MB and HDD controller support it

 

[cesmith9999]

Bullshit @chris.
Why are you posting this?

Please tell us the settings that allow disk spin down with the over time power savings.

At that time, I was fully involved with the devs at msft. I understand fully how the SS pools work. Since data can be written to any disk in the pool, while it may be possible to spin down individual disks, the probability that a disk will need to spin up to read/write data, effectively eliminating any benefit of spinning down disks for power effecentcy.

Chris

 

[Captain Lukey]

You will never be able to spin down disks with Storage Spaces as the feature continuously performs background tasks such as integrity checks, metadata updates, and resiliency operations, which keep ALL the drives active. Its that simple. If you look at the logs for the service you can see this.
look at Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > StorageSpaces-Driver > Operational or
Get-PhysicalDisk | Select FriendlyName, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus

forget storage spaces and explore..
$disks = Get-PhysicalDisk | Where-Object { $_.OperationalStatus -eq "OK" }
foreach ($disk in $disks) {
(Get-WmiObject Win32_DiskDrive | Where-Object { $_.DeviceID -eq $disk.DeviceId }).SendControl(0xD9, 0, 0)
}

 

[ca3y6]

At that time, I was fully involved with the devs at msft.

If you have some understanding of the internals of storage space, would you mind having a look at a question I asked on another thread if you have a minute? It is about the allocation algorithm used by storage space and whether it is careful not create too many permutations of disks when allocating slabs in a mirror array.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/storage-space-mirror-vs-raid10-for-a-large-array.47086/

 

[cesmith9999]

@gea is right on track.

My knowledge is confidential internal msft knowledge and I cannot tell you more than what is in all of the white papers and technical responses.

The project that I was working on at that time was a huge server/DFS system. It accepted 2 pb / deduped 2 pb / deleted 2 pb of data every day. And all of the data was (is still?) stored as storage spaces pools and volumes.

Chris

 

[ca3y6]

I am afraid gea's post is a generic response that has little to do with my question. Surely Microsoft must have addressed it, because the way I see it, if they don't do try to correlate disks, storage space mirror is far inferior in term of redundancy to any other disk pooling solution for large arrays. It's basically no better than a RAID5, and no one sane would ever suggest to do a single RAID5 array with 24 disks. I added some charts to illustrate what I meant.

 

[gea]

I cannot say if it is possible to let disks in a Storage Spaces Pool sleep. This depends if Microsoft had cared about and if you can disable all disk and monitoring tasks. The same problem that you see in ZFS. There you must (and can) disable all monitor and error alert tasks to allow sleep. Nothing that you want in any serious use case. Additionally there is a huge delay on access until all disks come up. With more than a few disks you may see a timeout prior that..

A Storage Spaces Pool is no raid in any way, its a Jbod construct for hybrid pools with disks of different types like hd, ssd, nvme or sizes. Redundancy (raid0, mirror, parity, dual parity), data location or Tiering is not managed over disks. You can define per Space (virtual disk). This creates data copes on related disk for that Space only with flexible use of hd, ssd or nvme, not classic raid stripes, the reason why you need more disks with a certain capacity ex 3/7 disks for a raid 5/6 alike data security of a Space or 5 disks for a Space with a 3way mirror alike redundancy.