Seagate Exos settings for raid

[Aardvark0]

Setting up new raids with X16 drives, pulled from expansion usbs.

The drives were set at 512e, switched them to 4096 no problem
ERC/TLER was set at 10s - sctReadTimer, sctWriteTimer, changed to 7s.

Most of the power related functions are disabled by default.
--lowCurrentSpinup
--puisFeature
--EPCfeature


There is not a clear explanation to what these do:

--powerBalanceFeature

"Seagate's PowerBalance feature will adjust drive performance during random operations to reduce power consumption of the drive."

--sataDIPMfeature
"SATA Device Initiated Power Management (DIPM) feature"

--sataDAPSfeature
"SATA Device Automatic Partial To Slumber Transitions (DAPS) feature"

Seagate support referred me to a white paper which still did not explain what these did.
Any experience enabling these?

Curios if these defaults are the same on a X16 that was not pulled from a usb case.

Usage is film post production - long periods of sequential read/writes, and then periods of no activity.
Priority is stability, performance, power savings - in that order.
Ideal to save power, but not if the drives will start dropping out of the raid.

Thank you

 

[i386]

The drives were set at 512e, switched them to 4096 no problem

How did you do that? I tried it with the seachest tools under windows and it bricked the hdd.

 

[Aardvark0]

SeaChest_Lite -d PD0 --setSectorSize 4096 --confirm this-will-erase-data

then reset, sector size seems to only be checked at boot.
might have unexpected results if the drive is in the usb enclosure, usb bridge might not support 4096 sector size.

these seem to be pointless with areca/lsi cards, scanning the drive at startup spins them up anyway, and you get device inserted messages in the log, which seems like it might cause problems.

--lowCurrentSpinup
--puisFeature

these cause the drive to drop out:
--sataDAPSfeature
--sataDIPMfeature

this causes 10%+ performance loss with undetectable power savings:
--powerBalanceFeature


so ended up just changing sector size and disabling spread spectrum.

 

[Marsovac]

this causes 10%+ performance loss with undetectable power savings:
--powerBalanceFeature

Does it help acoustics? I heard that this drive is super loud on random seeks.
Can you confirm this helps for that?

I personally would accept 50% performance loss, just to have a quiet drive, since the 1Gbit Ethernet will be the bottleneck anyway.