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Forum Discussion
Why UPS for Spin-Down?
Hi! Just a quick question I couldn't find the answer for. Why is it recommended to use an UPS, when you turn on HDD spin-down? How can data get lost? I'm doing an incremental backup once or twice a d...
Personally I recommend a UPS whether HDD Spin-down is enabled or not.
When data is written to the disks, it is queued up (and not written immediately). So if the power fails, the stuff waiting in the queue never gets written. When you use RAID, every thing needs to be written to at least 2 drives. Where things get particularly dodgy is when one of the drives gets written to, but the other[s] don't. That can put the RAID array out of sync, and do damage to the file system integrity. This might do minor damages, but if you are unlucky it can destroy everything - it all depends on what didn't make it to the disk, and what the NAS tries to do to repair the damage.
If the disks are spun down when you update data, then they need to be spun up first before anything can be written. While this is happening the queues can get pretty big, so there is more risk of corruption if the power happens to be cut during this time.
If you look through the posts here, you will find several from folks who weren't using a UPS and who lost all their data when the power failed. Its not something that happens every time, but it certainly is a real risk.
When data is written to the disks, it is queued up (and not written immediately). So if the power fails, the stuff waiting in the queue never gets written. When you use RAID, every thing needs to be written to at least 2 drives. Where things get particularly dodgy is when one of the drives gets written to, but the other[s] don't. That can put the RAID array out of sync, and do damage to the file system integrity. This might do minor damages, but if you are unlucky it can destroy everything - it all depends on what didn't make it to the disk, and what the NAS tries to do to repair the damage.
If the disks are spun down when you update data, then they need to be spun up first before anything can be written. While this is happening the queues can get pretty big, so there is more risk of corruption if the power happens to be cut during this time.
If you look through the posts here, you will find several from folks who weren't using a UPS and who lost all their data when the power failed. Its not something that happens every time, but it certainly is a real risk.
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