Hi,
i will enable the power saving of my harddisk. I have a VDR system with 2xFF card and 4 Harddisks.
Now i'm not sure, if this is a good idea and hwoto do it.
I have enable this powersaving, has it any disadvantage to the livetime of the harddisk?
Should i enable the powersaving or better the spin down in the BIOS or can i do it on my linux system?
What is the behaviour of VDR if a recording is starting and the HDD is not running? Will VDR send a startsignal to the harddisk early enough?
Thx for your answers.
Bye Matthias
Matthias Fechner wrote:
Hi,
i will enable the power saving of my harddisk. I have a VDR system with 2xFF card and 4 Harddisks.
Now i'm not sure, if this is a good idea and hwoto do it.
I have enable this powersaving, has it any disadvantage to the livetime of the harddisk?
If you use desktop harddrives it is not recommended to cycle them too often.
Should i enable the powersaving or better the spin down in the BIOS or can i do it on my linux system?
You can enable it with hdparm.
What is the behaviour of VDR if a recording is starting and the HDD is not running? Will VDR send a startsignal to the harddisk early enough?
Sorry, no idea about that cause my recording hdd is also my system hdd which I never suspend (as you need to do many things to teach linux not to write to hdd every few minutes). I only "suspend" my other hdds in my vdr server (as these are hdds for mp3s, documents and so on which are not needed most time of the day).
Greetings, Egalus
What is the behaviour of VDR if a recording is starting and the HDD is not running? Will VDR send a startsignal to the harddisk early enough?
With my Samsung SV1204H the startup time is short enough to record without any problem.
I use a readonly compact flash filesystem with RAM disk and the harddisk normally off, so hd startup doesn't occur that often.
Stephan
Stephan Sickert wrote:
What is the behaviour of VDR if a recording is starting and the HDD is not running? Will VDR send a startsignal to the harddisk early enough?
With my Samsung SV1204H the startup time is short enough to record without any problem.
I use a readonly compact flash filesystem with RAM disk and the harddisk normally off, so hd startup doesn't occur that often.
Stephan
cRecorder::cRecorder(...) { // Make sure the disk is up and running:
SpinUpDisk(FileName);
... }
See tools.c for the implementation of SpinUpDisk().
Klaus
Hi,
Matthias Fechner wrote:
What is the behaviour of VDR if a recording is starting and the HDD is not running? Will VDR send a startsignal to the harddisk early enough?
No, VDR does not send a startsignal. So the harddisc turns on directly before the recording. I can´t say if data is being buffered or if it is lost, up to now I had no problems, so I believe that there is enough buffering. BUT: My second HD goes down after 5 minutes and it is the bigger HD. So most of the recordings will start on the second HD and played back also only from the second disc, so I can´t say for sure if I simply had no problems because most of the time everything is recorded on the second disc. But I already had recordings distributed on both discs, and I have had no problems when I demuxed it, so no packages were lost.
Jörg
Joerg Knitter wrote 1 minute ago:
Matthias Fechner wrote:
What is the behaviour of VDR if a recording is starting and the HDD is not running? Will VDR send a startsignal to the harddisk early enough?
No, VDR does not send a startsignal. So the harddisc turns on directly
Like you can see from the mail of Klaus, this is rubbish. I just believed so because I often heard the sound of my hd spinning up directly before a timer recording.
Jörg
Hello Norbert,
* Norbert Goebel egalus@gmx.de [17-10-05 15:35]:
If you use desktop harddrives it is not recommended to cycle them too often.
i want only to power cyle my video disk, the main disk will run all the time, so powercyling should only be happened on recording and playback mode.
You can enable it with hdparm.
ah ok, i think hdparm -S180 should be a nice value.
Thx for all people how answered to my email.
Bye Matthias
On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 16:47 +0200, Matthias Fechner wrote:
- Norbert Goebel egalus@gmx.de [17-10-05 15:35]:
You can enable it with hdparm.
ah ok, i think hdparm -S180 should be a nice value.
Getting somewhat off topic here, but has anyone played with "hdparm -B"?
I tested it briefly on a laptop a while back and it seemed to enable HDD spindown based on $something too, but I'd like to know more details (than what the manual page says) exactly what it does in practice and hear others' experiences before trying it on a "production" VDR box...
idefix@fechner.net(Matthias Fechner) 17.10.05 14:41
Hi,
i will enable the power saving of my harddisk.
What CPU+VGA do you use? Have you meassured the power consumption?
I have a VDR system with 2xFF card and 4 Harddisks.
Now i'm not sure, if this is a good idea and hwoto do it.
I have enable this powersaving, has it any disadvantage to the livetime of the harddisk?
No. Not if you don't spin down it every 2sec for 1sec 365*24h
Should i enable the powersaving or better the spin down in the BIOS or can i do it on my linux system?
Using the BIOS has the disadvantage that you need a VGA to change the values...
Have a look at the "noflushd" package. It will spindown all /dev/hd you like to spin down.
But it does (currently?) not work with SCSI/USB disks curently. So you need "sdparm" to spinn down those drives too.
But to really save power, power off the entire box and repower it with acip wakeup or nvram wakeup tools.
What is the behaviour of VDR if a recording is starting and the HDD is not running? Will VDR send a startsignal to the harddisk early enough?
AFAIK VDR can do only "shutdown" but not pindown un nneded disk. I assume that would be too much work. If the Vido disk is idle for 5 minutes spin it down.
Or replace the 4 small disks with one big! If one disk requires 10W and run 7*24h it will generate costs about (currently) 10..15 Euro (in Germany). 3 disks 45 oy 200GB Disk 90 oy: in less than 2 years the disk was paid by your energy company...
Rainer
Hello Rainer,
* Rainer Zocholl UseNet-Posting-Nospam-74308-@zocki.toppoint.de [23-10-05 23:39]:
What CPU+VGA do you use? Have you meassured the power consumption?
the point here is, that i dont want to save electrical power, more to increase the livetime of my harddisks. All cheap harddrives are build to run 8 hours and 5 days a week and not more. If you run it 24 hours a day, the lifetime is decreasing significantly (i think instead of 100 hours you only have 20 hours).
I have enable this powersaving, has it any disadvantage to the livetime of the harddisk?
No. Not if you don't spin down it every 2sec for 1sec 365*24h
ah ok, that is fine to hear.
Have a look at the "noflushd" package. It will spindown all /dev/hd you like to spin down.
thx, i installed it now, with hdparm it seems that i have some problems. If i send the sleep command with hdparm it is going to sleep but not automatically if i set the timeout with hdparm.
Or replace the 4 small disks with one big! If one disk requires 10W and run 7*24h it will generate costs about (currently) 10..15 Euro (in Germany). 3 disks 45 oy 200GB Disk 90 oy: in less than 2 years the disk was paid by your energy company...
:) i have 4x160GB running on my system *g*
Bye Matthias
On 23 Oct 2005 23:39:00 +0200 Rainer Zocholl wrote:
I have a VDR system with 2xFF card and 4 Harddisks.
Now i'm not sure, if this is a good idea and hwoto do it.
I have enable this powersaving, has it any disadvantage to the livetime of the harddisk?
No. Not if you don't spin down it every 2sec for 1sec 365*24h
Wikipedia article on hard disks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk) claims that some desktop hard drives are rated to only 50,000 start-stop cycles. That means having 10 cycles a day amounts to a lifetime of 13.7 years. However, the number of 50,000 cycles has been measured with new drives, not 5 year old ones. In practice the drive can be expected to fail much sooner. How much sooner, that is hard to say, but with these numbers the normal 3 - 5 cycles / day would probably be just fine.
Or replace the 4 small disks with one big! If one disk requires 10W and run 7*24h it will generate costs about (currently) 10..15 Euro (in Germany). 3 disks 45 oy 200GB Disk 90 oy: in less than 2 years the disk was paid by your energy company...
Unless you live far in the North (or even further in the South) and have partially electric heating. Then it is probably better to leave those disks spinning and releasing all that heat to the room. Oh well, it's the time of year to overclock those CPUs again :)
-- Niko Mikkilä
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Joerg Knitter -
Klaus Schmidinger -
Matthias Fechner -
Niko Mikkila -
Norbert Goebel -
Rainer Zocholl -
Stephan Sickert -
Ville Skyttä