No idle disks with Intel raid on Windows?

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John M.

Member
Mar 7, 2016
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Hi,

I'm using the onboard intel raid on Windows.
But the disks from my raid array don't seem to spin down... any idea what could be causing this?

It is set in the intel storage management.
And in the windows power management plan.

But they keep spinning... just keep spinning...

raid1.JPG
raid2.JPGraid3.JPG
 

Bert

Well-Known Member
Mar 31, 2018
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I don't think I have anything useful to add but I recommend not spending too much on this,. Spin down behavior involves many component and I don't expect it to work in a raid. To make that work robust, custom software is written to directly talk to hard drives.
 

Stephan

Well-Known Member
Apr 21, 2017
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Might be some SMART utility or Windows itself doing SMART checks every x minutes, preventing a spin down. Or the Intel RST driver issuing commands for who knows what behind your back. Without source code hard to tell what that switch is actually doing. If you can, try with a single really old 100-500 GB disk to narrow it down command-capability-wise.

This is difficult to achieve under Linux even. Under Linux I had to tweak smartd to check for sleep first, before a SMART-check command is issued. Otherwise all disks wake up again. Similarly there is a package on Linux called udisks2, which will poll the SMART status every 10 minutes, keeping disks awake. Gets installed with every desktop installation so a user can e.g. mount USB thumb drives without being root. Had to patch the package to increase the interval to 60 minutes. Then, I needed to use hd-idle to issue a sleep command to the disks when nothing happened within the last 30 minutes. Because another problem is that modern disks might not support the legacy APM set-sleep-timer-commands anymore, only EPC (Extended power Conditions). I tried both APC and EPC timers on my 14 GB HGST drives, so drives sleep by themselves after a while, without external intervention, but both methods were in my case inoperable. Hence hd-idle as the last straw. There's a software called "openSeaChest" which lets you experiment with EPC. All in all, pretty damn frustrating.

RAID 0 with 6 SATA disks btw is what I call audacious. One dead disk and all data, poof gone.
 

Connorise

Member
Mar 2, 2017
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As far as I know, Intel RST doesn't properly operate with sleep mode with HDDs. Maybe, it is related to RAID-0, since data is striped across all drives and the array is forced to keep them always online.
According to this thread on the Intel community forum, this feature is broken, and only very old firmware does actually work fine. I would advocate either use 3rd party tools to force HDDs to sleep or trying another RAID mechanism that actually supports spin-down.
 
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