NAS drives never sleeping

Tavis75 · 24 Jul 2024 at 08:29

I have a Asustor 10 Bay Nas with a number of drives in (a pair of 2TB SSDs mirrored for the system drive, 4 16TB drives in RAID6 for main storage, a single 3TB drive as a TV recording drive and a pair of 1TB M2 SSDs as read\write cache.

I am noticing that the drives never seem to sleep, even with the sleep timeout set to 5 minutes, I have hard disk hibernation logging turned on and looking back over the last few days there is not a single instance of the drives hibernating. Running the diagnostic tool in hardware settings shows no processes other than a occasional read of Volume126 by in:imklog (not even sure what volume126 is, possibly the cache?). The process monitor shows all processes as either sleeping or unknown.

Does anyone have any thoughts of anything else I could check or what the problem might be? Mostly concerned about the RAID6 drives, as they are used for Plex storage and it could be several days between access, so shutting them down seems sensible. The RAID6 drives are Seagate Exos drives in case that is relevant.

Nemiyen · 24 Jul 2024 at 08:37

Not really got anything I can be sure about other than:

If you isolate the NAS, does this still happen? E.g. all usb and network connections removed.

Do you have any plugins installed on the NAS box that are keeping the system awake? I'm guessing you're running Plex on the NAS or is it just used for storage? Can you remove them one by one to see if this helps?

I'd also check updates to the drives, NAS boxes and plugins, if it's a pain to remove them.

If you post model numbers I'm sure we can all see if there's a known bug or issue etc. I wouldn't put too much trust into the diagnostics reports as they can be wrong, potentially. I'm guessing you aren't hearing the drives actually power down and the system is keeping them spinning?

Tavis75 · 24 Jul 2024 at 09:12

The NAS is a Lockerstor AS6510T, the Seagate Exos drives are ST16000NM001G.

Plex is running on it but not doing any processing at this time, I am running very little else on it,only installed apps other than Plex are UPnP Media Server (for music which is stored on the system drive only), plus JRE Java and FFmpeg.

I can physically hear the drives, so not just relying on the log. Just tried disconnecting the ethernet cables for a while and that made no difference.

Nemiyen · 24 Jul 2024 at 09:30

I tried searching for firmware updates but the Seagate site is asking for serial numbers, unfortunately.

My guess is Plex or another app is keeping the drives alive and a quick search on the Internet does have a few people mentioning this, but it is hard to sort the crap from the truth lol.

Unless there's a check for updates or scan for media changes option you can turn off in plex, this might be keeping the drives on, or if there's a data or cache directory that's looking at the mechanical drives instead of the ssds you can change. I'm not sure if during the Plex install you can change where it installs to? I'm guessing it's in the NAS' storage, rather than the disks, but this could be the issue if Plex is installed on the mechanical location and not the internal one or SSDs?

Sorry, just guessing and I'm sure someone who uses Plex might have some specific settings to try. Disconnecting the ethernet is worth while if you've got some WOL packets flying around for some reason but it was a long shot.

On a side note, that NAS looks pretty great and is probably completely overkill for my needs but I like it!