Fun with an MD1200/MD1220 & SC200/SC220

[Sellular]

Has anyone found a reliable way to spindown/spinup the harddrives, or the enclosure itself? I see there's a `_shutdown` command that can be used to power off the unit, but not sure if there's a good way to remotely turn it back up. Or if I should look into spinning down/up the hard drives themselves?

I'm asking because I recently (finally) got a UPS and this would be helpful in the case of a power outage to conserve internet up-time. I'm already turning off my servers automatically when power outage occurs so doing so on my MD1200 would be helpful too. Not sure if figuring out how to hack something together to turn off/on the connections to the power cables would work too

 

[PatchouliTC]

Has anyone found a reliable way to spindown/spinup the harddrives, or the enclosure itself? I see there's a `_shutdown` command that can be used to power off the unit, but not sure if there's a good way to remotely turn it back up. Or if I should look into spinning down/up the hard drives themselves?

I'm asking because I recently (finally) got a UPS and this would be helpful in the case of a power outage to conserve internet up-time. I'm already turning off my servers automatically when power outage occurs so doing so on my MD1200 would be helpful too. Not sure if figuring out how to hack something together to turn off/on the connections to the power cables would work too

i have read dell manual,it seems that `_shutdown` command may used when emm failed/temp to high/lost one power module too long,so i think this command used for shutdown if sys will be break in emm internal;

Also I find a post here [How to perform a graceful shutdown of MD3220 | DELL Technologies] this guy was look for soft shutdown because building power outage,it also show that DELL Modular Disk Storage Manager app has no option to "soft shutdown.",and dell Moderator says " Yes you are correct to power off the MD’s you will just flip the switch or pull the power cord. "
So i believe if power down,just make sure your hba card device success shutdown,then just wait ups shutdown[only sure when enclosure lost power no device use it] and just do nothing.(maybe when power back,your hbd card device should wait 1~2minute for MD1200 start then power on)
After all, looking at it from another perspective, the act of switching the power button on and off is similar to the act of keeping the power button on to turn the power on and off.

 

[mr44er]

Or if I should look into spinning down/up the hard drives themselves?

This! Let the disks do it on their own.

System hanging when trying to spin-up from HD idle

I've searched an found that sometimes LSI's SAS controllers will hang up when HDs are woken up from an idle state (idled using hd-idle). I'm experiencing this with my pve system. I've even swapped out controller cards using a different LSI controller and the problem persists. At this point, I...

forum.proxmox.com

 

[logixworx]

I have two SC220 stacked in the front of a closed 42u rack cabinet - I want to redirect 4u of SC220 exhaust into 2u of open space in the rear. I feel the SC220 exhaust is too far from the back of the cabinet anyway and may be blowing heat into the cab through the sides. Think of modifying a cantilever shelf into a baffle with a sloped top and sides. I could move my APC 7900B into that space. Any issue with this design?




illustration

 

[Flipt]

Thanks to everyone that contributed to this thread. I was about to do a fan swap before coming across this thread. Opted to try the serial cable method instead which is now working great. A cron job was scheduled to run the following script every minute:

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..10}
do
stty -F /dev/ttyS0 speed 38400 cs8 -ixon raw
echo -ne "_shutup 20\n\r" > /dev/ttyS0
sleep 5
done
exit

 

[Andyman!]

Just made this account to say a huge thank you.


I'm completely new to the server world, and this is my first time diving into Dell gear. I made the rookie mistake of buying an SFF Dell server thinking I’d save myself £100… only to find out the largest spinning disk it supports is 2TB. That was a blow.


So I picked up a Dell MD1200 shelf and everything needed to expand — and suddenly that £100 saving turned into an extra £300 with cables, PCIe cards, and everything else.


When I powered it all on, the fans were insanely loud — my server lives right next to my desk (despite my wife’s best efforts to move it), and even she said she could live with the noise... but I couldn't.


After a full day of reading your posts and retrying things, I finally managed to get serial access working using a DIY cable setup. I went from 70dB down to 40dB just by running set_speed 20, and the difference is unreal — the room feels peaceful again.


I didn’t want to spend £30 on a prebuilt cable, so I DIY’d it for around £25 using different adapters and breakouts. It took a bit longer, but I learned so much along the way, and that knowledge is absolutely priceless.


Thank you again for sharing this info — you saved my ears, my sanity, and possibly my marriage.