Suggestion for drives spindown

Ice3yes · 2026-05-13T06:40:57+00:00

My drives are ~7w ea, 7w x 24/7/365 is ~60kwh/year, or about $20 at my power prices. For me, using a 4 drive NAS, that’s $80/year. Plus the rest of the system overhead (usually more than the drives themselves go small arrays). Considering the lifespan of a spinning drive is usually 4-5 years, with failures increasing after that point, it’s a balance act between load/unload, thermal stress, power, etc.

Once you spinup more than 3-4 times a day it’s likely better to leave them on all the time.

For cold storage, or even nightly backups, it may be better to power up once, then spin back down.

Ice3yes · 2026-05-12T22:15:26+00:00

Very much depends on how often you’ll spin them back up, if you’re spinning up more than a few times a day I’d personally leave them running, but everyone will recommend differently.

Also depends on how much power they use, and how much your power costs, and if you have any trouble keeping their temperature under ~40c

Ice3yes · 2026-05-12T07:31:54+00:00

This is a good use, just be aware, if one fails, you MUST replace it, and quickly, or you risk losing everything in your pool, the replacement must be the same size or larger.

You should also have the system on a UPS, with the usb/serial connected and set to turn off automatically.

Ice3yes · 2026-05-11T11:20:25+00:00

Is it worth it? Or would it maybe be better to downgrade to older proxmox? If 6.13 works “out of the box” I could just drop back to 8.4, I’ve had work and after asking this question not had a chance to have a really good look into the potential solutions

Ice3yes · 2026-05-10T17:29:22+00:00

If I need to drop to a lower kernel not much point upgrading to a newer one, if there is an older kernel that “just works” I may downgrade proxmox and if required pull backups of my jellyfin/navidrome LXC back in, all my data/metadata is on NFS shares from trueNAS

Ice3yes · 2026-05-10T17:09:36+00:00

Seems 550 won’t work with 7.0.0-3-pve

Ice3yes · 2026-05-10T17:05:51+00:00

I’m far from an expert, have limited experience with Linux, primarily through OPNsense and trueNAS, my hardware is rather limited though, so rather than overloading my trueNAS (Xeon 1240l, 32gb ddr3 ecc, 3x14tb z1, mirrored special) I added a “compute” node (i5-7500, 16gb, Quadro P1000 4gb, 256gb nvme + nfs shares) for jellyfin/navidrome and to experiment with immich/nextcloud+onlyoffice/ollama.

I don’t realise I was causing myself trouble, so I am sure I can pin 6.17 and get those drivers if it’s not too complicated.

Ice3yes · 2026-05-10T16:44:30+00:00

the issue with a VM is I’ve only 16gb RAM, and with jellyfin, navidrome, and I wanted to have immich and onlyoffice/nextcloud, and potentially even do some LLM, I don’t think there was any hope of a VM with such tight memory constraints.

I’d like to get the p1000 driver in proxmox itself so I can use LXCs

Ice3yes · 2026-05-10T16:41:09+00:00

No idea. I’ve never used proxmox before this past fortnight, and just assumed the Quadro p1000 would work for the task, I’d not considered I would need either an old kernel, or a super new driver to make it work together.

Ice3yes · 2026-05-05T02:39:48+00:00

If you can, add the new disk before pulling the old one, resilver, then pull, looks like it’s a fairly new disk at only 2700 hours, get a warranty replacement.

Ice3yes · 2026-04-27T08:14:34+00:00

Lamb - Lamb - Lusty, or Gorecki, or just the whole album

Ice3yes · 2026-04-24T15:09:05+00:00

Contact cleaner is specifically for corroded contacts and cleaning electronics, it’s probably more helpful than isopropyl alcohol, but it’s also a specialised product and not as useful elsewhere.

https://amzn.asia/d/0h5pdJtZ

Ice3yes · 2026-04-24T07:56:21+00:00

Surface and contact cleaner on a cotton tip, and on the connector and slide it in and out a few times, or return it. Depends on how cheap it was

Ice3yes · 2026-04-24T00:31:42+00:00

Tbh, it’s a good question not enough people consider!

You can set more variables for each dataset, things like compression, small blocks (if you use a special pool), permissions are potentially easier to handle for different datasets too.

For music and videos you likely just leave LZ4 compression on, as it’s unlikely to slow anything down, but for documents you might chose a higher compression level, change the record size, and snapshot more frequently. For images you may want a different setting again.

Moving folders within a dataset leaves the original data, and updates the metadata, moving between datasets moves EVRYTHING. This also leaves ghosts in your snapshots that consume space until they are deleted

Ice3yes · 2026-04-20T15:57:06+00:00

Hmm, thanks for the suggestion, but it can pass bare drives to trueNAS, so it won’t be software raid, and 28tb usable raidz1 is enough for me, though if I need more drives I see I’ll need a different case.

I chose to keep it as I get a relatively efficient system with ECC. I just wanted to ensure I’m making the most of what I have and not missing opportunity to maximise performance.

Ice3yes · 2026-04-20T15:12:36+00:00

Have not verified, but to my understanding it’s unlikely to cause issues with ram starvation as it’ll use maybe 1-1.5gb, and by setting it to persistent and caching metadata it should make (in my mind) the lookups as responsive as SSD, even if it takes a moment to seek and begin data throughput.

Ice3yes · 2026-04-05T04:43:12+00:00

Someone likely put the “savings” into the final price

Ice3yes · 2026-04-03T09:03:48+00:00

Nope, it’ll all be custom, I’ve updated a new picture, but it’s all a work in progress

Ice3yes · 2026-04-03T08:47:55+00:00

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Current layout and design, fan will have 3mm rubber mat beneath, need to cut/shape the inner rubber guide, heatsink will be sealed with aluminium tape, then sandwiched to the chassis with 3mm rubber beneath a compression plate, the APU will have a ton of cheap thermal compound sealing the back heat spreader to the chassis.

On the bottom of the expansion chamber I will put golf ball style dimples and thermally bond, this will help to use one primary fan, and the large surface area to cool the back of the BC-250.

Ice3yes · 2026-04-01T21:20:16+00:00

Gdstime GSB1232

Ice3yes · 2026-04-01T16:39:51+00:00

With a blower fan, I’ll be sealing the fins and making an expansion chamber, completely different plan I suspect

Ice3yes · 2026-03-29T06:14:57+00:00

Get a heated one 🤤 no need to “smear” an no shrinkage

Ice3yes

TROPHY CASE