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> There have been drives where power cycling was hazardous. I know about this story from 30+ years ago. It may have been true then. It may be even true now. Y

> There have been drives where power cycling was hazardous. I know about this story from 30+ years ago. It may have been true then. It may be even true now. Yet, in my case, I don't power cycle these drives often. At most a few times a month. I can't say or prove it's a huge risk. I only believe it's not. I have accepted this risk for over 15+ years. Update: remember that hard drives have an option to spin down when idle. So hard drives can handle many spinups a day.

neilv 2y ago
In the early '90s, some Quantum 105S hard drives had a "stiction" problem, and were shipped with Sun SPARCstations. IME at the time, power off a bunch of workstations, such as for building electrical work, and probably at least one of them wouldn't spin back up the next business day. Pulling the drive sled, and administering percussive maintenance against the desktop, could work. https://sunmanagers.org/1992/0383.html https://sunmanagers.org/1992/0383.html
- ghaff 2y ago
  Stiction was definitely a thing back in that general period when you'd sometimes knock a drive to get it back to working again.
ggm 2y ago
I debated posting because it felt like shitstirring. I think overwhelmingly what you're doing is right. And if a remote power on eg WOL works on the device, so much the better. If I could wish for one thing, it's mods to code or documentation of how to handle drive power down on zfs. The rumour mill is zfs doesn't like spindown.
- louwrentius 2y ago
  I did try using HDD spindown on ZFS but I remember (It's a long time ago) that I encountered too many vague errors that scared me and I just disabled spindown all together.
- Kirby64 2y ago
  What is there to handle? I have a ZFS array that works just fine with hard drives that automatically spin down. ZFS handles this without an issue. The main gotchas tend to be: if you use the array for many things, especially stuff that throws off log files, you will constantly be accessing that array and resetting the spin down timers. Or you might be just at the threshold for spindown and you'll put a ton of cycles on it as it bounces from spindown to access to spin up. For a static file server (rarely accessed backups or media), partitioned correctly, it works great.

neilv 2y ago

In the early '90s, some Quantum 105S hard drives had a "stiction" problem, and were shipped with Sun SPARCstations. IME at the time, power off a bunch of workstations, such as for building electrical work, and probably at least one of them wouldn't spin back up the next business day. Pulling the drive sled, and administering percussive maintenance against the desktop, could work. https://sunmanagers.org/1992/0383.html https://sunmanagers.org/1992/0383.html

ghaff 2y ago
Stiction was definitely a thing back in that general period when you'd sometimes knock a drive to get it back to working again.

ggm 2y ago

I debated posting because it felt like shitstirring. I think overwhelmingly what you're doing is right. And if a remote power on eg WOL works on the device, so much the better. If I could wish for one thing, it's mods to code or documentation of how to handle drive power down on zfs. The rumour mill is zfs doesn't like spindown.

louwrentius 2y ago
I did try using HDD spindown on ZFS but I remember (It's a long time ago) that I encountered too many vague errors that scared me and I just disabled spindown all together.
Kirby64 2y ago
What is there to handle? I have a ZFS array that works just fine with hard drives that automatically spin down. ZFS handles this without an issue. The main gotchas tend to be: if you use the array for many things, especially stuff that throws off log files, you will constantly be accessing that array and resetting the spin down timers. Or you might be just at the threshold for spindown and you'll put a ton of cycles on it as it bounces from spindown to access to spin up. For a static file server (rarely accessed backups or media), partitioned correctly, it works great.