Better Power Management?

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Not sure if it is possible, of really useful in terms of energy consumption, 
but would it be possible to have a schedule, on which we would stop (almost) 
all services and force the disks to go on standby?

From what I am seeing with my DNS-323, the unit, even if not being used for 
many hours, still is with 40.0°C of temperature (on a cold room), CPU at 10%, 
and sporadicly running the fan. I know the hardware has limitations, but 
couldn't this behavior be improved?

On my case, the unit is only for a once a week backup from another NAS, so it 
would be great to minimize completely the power consumption of the unit most of 
the time.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by miguel.d...@gmail.com on 18 Feb 2012 at 12:11

[GoogleCodeExporter]

You must be running some service that is awakening the disks, such as running 
'ntp' as a daemon, or having 'cleanup' active, etc (in general schedule tasks 
activated through cron).

Also, if you have samba active and some network device is always powered-on, it 
might be regularly asking for a status update, possibly awaking disks.

Some other media-serving services, such as minidlna, transmission, mediatomb, 
might also awake disks.

You have to identify first what the culprit is, then you can setup a cron job 
to (de)activate the service as needed.

E.g., if samba is the problem you can use the following cron jobs:

0 1 * * *  /sbin/rcsmb stop # stops samba everyday at 1 o'clock in the morning
0 8 * * *  /sbin/rcsmb start # starts samba everyday at 8 o'clock in the morning

For RC2 you will have a crontab editor.

My system log, filtered with "fan", shows

Feb 15 17:33:17 nas daemon.info sysctrl: temp=40.3       fan=2146
Feb 15 17:54:19 nas daemon.info sysctrl: temp=39.9       fan=2039
Feb 15 18:05:19 nas daemon.info sysctrl: temp=39.4       fan=0
...
Feb 18 08:07:57 nas daemon.info sysctrl: temp=35.9       fan=0

and filtered by "disk":

Feb 15 17:32:47 nas daemon.info sysctrl: right_dev disk (sda) wakeup
Feb 15 17:32:47 nas daemon.info sysctrl: left_dev disk (sdb) wakeup
Feb 15 17:54:03 nas daemon.info sysctrl: left_dev disk (sdb) standby
Feb 15 17:55:24 nas daemon.info sysctrl: right_dev disk (sda) standby

This is a non-fixable "issue"

Original comment by whoami.j...@gmail.com on 18 Feb 2012 at 5:24

• Changed state: WontFix

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks for your comments. I actually had Samba active and, as you told, another 
network device with the Samba directory mounted. Just disconnected it, lets see 
if the disks get in a permanent sleeping status.

Original comment by miguel.d...@gmail.com on 19 Feb 2012 at 12:45