ZFS Controll HDD SpinDown

jbo@

Developer
I have a neat HPE microserver Gen10 plus running FreeBSD 13.0. Super nice experience for a small home NAS.

An "issue" I noticed is that my four main storage disks (ZFS raidz-2) are spinning down and back up quite a lot. I know that I was thinking about disk spin down when I was initially setting up the system but according to my memory I never committed to that - but that is unlikely false.
I'd like to figure out how to disable the disk spin down.

So far I have checked the BIOS/UEFI options and I couldn't find any related option(s). Therefore, I assume that this is a FreeBSD setting.
Could somebody shed some light on how to properly figure out whether spin down is enabled and how to disable it? I seem to find "controversial" information on this topic.

I assume that I want to look at camcontrol idle, camcontrol apm and camcontrol epc?
 
Seagate has specific commands you can send to drives via openSeaChest to permanently control the spin settings. Camcontrol is what I use to spin up/down drives before/after mounting/unmounting without relying on timeouts, but I don't know if it will do what you want.
 
Seagate has specific commands you can send to drives via openSeaChest to permanently control the spin settings. Camcontrol is what I use to spin up/down drives before/after mounting/unmounting without relying on timeouts, but I don't know if it will do what you want.
Thanks, but I am not using Seagate drives.

You might have a look at the command,
/usr/sbin/diskinfo
and the ports,
sysutils/smartmontools
sysutils/spindown
sysutils/spindown seems to only work for SCSI & Firewire drives - not my use case. Furthermore, it seems to be designed for spindown - which is the opposite of what I want.

Let me rephrase my original inquiry: Does FreeBSD by default spindown disks? If not, which parameters can be adjusted to achieve this and how would I figure out what the default parameters would be that I have to re-apply to revert the system back to a state where no spindown occurs? All of this would be within the scope of the base system as shipped and only concerning SATA drives used in a ZFS pool.
 
If you tell what drives you have it would be much easier to give you advice. If you have "Green" HDDs you're screwed as they're hardcoded in firmware
 
If you tell what drives you have it would be much easier to give you advice. If you have "Green" HDDs you're screwed as they're hardcoded in firmware
I'll have to check. They are certainly proper 24/7 NAS drives. Thinking about it, they might actually be IronWolfs so my answer to msplsh might have been wrong.
I control timed HDD spindown through camcontrol standby. Should allow you to disable it as well.
Is there a way to check the current value? The manpage of the command states "Put ATA device into STANDBY mode. [...]". I would like to check the current value first.
 
Is there a way to check the current value?
Try smartctl(8) provided by sysutils/smartmontools. Reference:
 
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