How to know what app is preventing HDDs to idle

[gustavo1spbr]

I have my Synology configured to idle the HDDs after x minutes of innactivity, but this never happens. Anytime I check they are spinning, and they get reasonably warm, which is a loss of lifespan and electricity, plus unnecessary noise.

So my question is whether there is a way to verify what app / process is preventing the HDDs to idle. Thanks a lot!

 

[sfx2000]

Anytime I check they are spinning, and they get reasonably warm, which is a loss of lifespan and electricity,

They should spin down - however if you have shares mounted on clients, they may be keeping files open or other activity...

Keeping the drives spinning uses very little power, and is actually better for lifespan of the drives - most failures occur at spin up from dead idle.

 

[gustavo1spbr]

They should spin down - however if you have shares mounted on clients, they may be keeping files open or other activity...

I don't have shares mounted. Also tried uninstalling mostly everything, including all non essential Synology's own apps. To no avail.

Keeping the drives spinning uses very little power, and is actually better for lifespan of the drives - most failures occur at spin up from dead idle.

Interesting. Didn't know that. I thought idling would extend the lifetime.

 

[gustavo1spbr]

They should spin down - however if you have shares mounted on clients, they may be keeping files open or other activity...

Keeping the drives spinning uses very little power, and is actually better for lifespan of the drives - most failures occur at spin up from dead idle.

Just found this online:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf


"Power Cycles. The power cycles indicator counts the number of times a drive is powered up and down. In a server-class deployment, in which drives are powered continuously, we do not expect to reach high enough power cycle counts to see any effects on failure rates. Our results find that for drives aged up to two years, this is true, there is no significant correlation between failures and high power cycles count. But for drives 3 years and older, higher power cycle counts can increase the absolute failure rate by over 2%. We believe this is due more to our population mix than to aging effects. Moreover, this correlation could be the effect (not the cause) of troubled machines that require many repair iterations and thus many power cycles to be fixed."

So it seems frequent power cycling only causes an increase of 2% in failure rates. If such is the case, the benefits of lower noise, lower temp, and lower power consumption would outweight the higher failure rate.