SOLVED How to prevent SMART from spinning up drives?

[treant]

I have two Seagate drives that, after a lot of research, I realised are kept spun up by SMART.
In particular, if I follow the advice given here and add

Code:

DEVICESCAN -n standby,15,q

to /etc/smartd.conf, the disks manage to stay idle for long periods of time. However, this setting is removed at each reboot, and needs a systemctl restart smartd before it can take any effect.

I cannot add -n standby to the specific drive SMART options from the config since I get the error

Code:

"-n" is an invalid extra smart option

from the UI.

I could disable SMART for those drives, but I do not want to do that. And unfortunately, this method for configuring SMART only appears to be for CORE, not SCALE?

Should I add a script to add the above line to /etc/smartd.conf at boot, and restart smartd?
Or is there any better alternative?

 

[sfatula]

As opposed to your devicescan commands, have you tried in Scale with the Storage -> Disks -> Edit screen under power management? I have an external USB drive I keep powered off and disconnected for backups and this works to keep it idle. Though if your drives have any IO, they won't spin down obviously.

 

[treant]

As opposed to your devicescan commands, have you tried in Scale with the Storage -> Disks -> Edit screen under power management? I have an external USB drive I keep powered off and disconnected for backups and this works to keep it idle. Though if your drives have any IO, they won't spin down obviously.

Thanks for your reply; I have tried setting -n for each device manually, but I am getting the error I described above when I save the settings:

Code:

"-n" is an invalid extra smart option

So it appears that's forbidden by the UI.

Unless you are referring to a different, more generic setting?

 

[sfatula]

Did you navigate to where I said in the Scale UI, Storage -> Disks -> Edit screen under power management? It may be different path in Cobia but it's whereever the disk management screen is in Cobia. By drive you can set power management settings in the UI, what version of Scale are you on?

 

[treant]

Did you navigate to where I said in the Scale UI, Storage -> Disks -> Edit screen under power management? It may be different path in Cobia but it's whereever the disk management screen is in Cobia. By drive you can set power management settings in the UI, what version of Scale are you on?

Indeed, it's what I'm talking about! I'm on Cobia as well.

 

[sfatula]

NO, to the left of all that, under "Power Management". You're still trying to adjust smart parms. You have smart disabled, you can adjust the standby time via the left of that section. Then, if you still want smart, maybe make a cron to do short tests daily at some time during the night perhaps?

If you look in System Settings -> Services -> Smart, you can see "never" there and you can change it but the screen says tests are only run if never is set. Which is odd, not sure if that's true or not. I'm skeptical though as if you do change it to standby, the /etc/smartd.conf changes from -n never to -n standby. It doesn't apparently let you set it per disk as you noticed. I'd experiment with changing that service option and seeing if you do ever get smart tests, and if not, simply change the standby time as I noted and make a cron job to schedule your own.

 

[treant]

NO, to the left of all that, under "Power Management". You're still trying to adjust smart parms. You have smart disabled, you can adjust the standby time via the left of that section. Then, if you still want smart, maybe make a cron to do short tests daily at some time during the night perhaps?

If you look in System Settings -> Services -> Smart, you can see "never" there and you can change it but the screen says tests are only run if never is set. Which is odd, not sure if that's true or not. I'm skeptical though as if you do change it to standby, the /etc/smartd.conf changes from -n never to -n standby. It doesn't apparently let you set it per disk as you noticed. I'd experiment with changing that service option and seeing if you do ever get smart tests, and if not, simply change the standby time as I noted and make a cron job to schedule your own.

OH, RIGHT!
I don't know how I managed to miss that! Really sorry. Will try and report back!

 

[treant]

It works perfectly, thank you!