Disks spinning down too often in the ReadyNAS Duo v2
I have the ReadyNAS Duo v2 and, as others have noticed, this puppy sure spins down its disks very quickly (to save the planet!). This is great and all...in theory...but when I'm streaming small audio files (podcasts/radioshows) the disks will spin down by the time a track has finished and then have to spin back up for every new track. The result is a spin-down and spin-up every 10 or 15 minutes which to me seems fairly ridiculous and dangerous. OK maybe its not that bad. But I most definitely don't like the idea of my disks spinning up and down this often considering that the poor guys have a limited number of total spin-ups and spin-downs before they die forever.
Here are my questions:
1) Can anyone (Netgear?) verify that there are plans to fix this or add a configuration option for it in frontview at some point in the future? 2) Until then, or if (God forbid) there are no plans to change this behavior, is it possible (safe?) to attempt to use something like to hdparm to manually alter the spin-down times of the drives in the Duo v2?
Re: Disks spinning down too often in the ReadyNAS Duo v2
2) Edit /etc/default/services using vi (see MAN page) and add the line "NOFLUSHD=240" (no quotes). This should change the spin-down time to every four hours I think. On the Duo v2 if the NOFLUSHD option isn't in /etc/default/services (it won't be unless you manually set it via SSH) then it will automatically be set to 10 minutes.
Re: Disks spinning down too often in the ReadyNAS Duo v2
mdgm,
You are the man. Or woman. I've added the line and set it to 60 minutes. I'll watch my logs to verify its working and report back if something terrible happens. But this looks like the ideal solution. Thanks!
Re: Disks spinning down too often in the ReadyNAS Duo v2
Adding the NOFLUSHD=60 line didn't take effect immediately but a reboot did the trick. With the spin-down time set to 60 minutes I didn't see any spinning down at all, even during the night. I have an IM program occasionally writing its logs to the ReadyNAS which was probably accessing it more than once an hour. I've set NOFLUSHD to 30 minutes, we'll see if that actually allows it to spindown during periods of low activity. Either way I'd rather have no spin-down than a spin-down every 10 minutes so this has definitely solved my problem. Thanks again mdgm!
