Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[FenceMan]

This isn't specific to one version of JRiver, I have several hard drives hooked up in a pretty simple USB configuration (not concerned with lost data since I have the discs of everything that is on the drives anyway).  Drives go to sleep after XX amount of time and if JRiver tries to play something from a drive that is sleeping about 75% of the time this results in JRiver freezing and needing to be shut down via task manager.  Its like its waiting for data that is not yet there and it just gets lost and cannot recover.

Is there a way to prevent this?  I like that my drives go to sleep which I assume will prolong their life but its quite the pain every time I start a movie from one of them.

[htnut]

I found that two W10 settings need to be set so that USB HDDs do not sleep:


1:
Control Panel — Device Manager
Attach your USB drive(s)
For each item under “Universal Serial Bus Controllers”, right click _ Properties _ Power Management:  Uncheck “allow this computer to turn off…”

2:
Control Panel — Power Options — (select “Balanced”) _ click “change plan settings”
Turn off hard disks: “Never”
USB Settings _ SUB Selective Suspend Setting:  Disabled

[FenceMan]

I found that two W10 settings need to be set so that USB HDDs do not sleep:


1:
Control Panel — Device Manager
Attach your ISB drive(s)
For each item under “Universal Serial Bus Controllers”, right click _ Properties _ Power Management:  Uncheck “allow this computer to turn off…”

2:
Control Panel — Power Options — (select “Balanced”) _ click “change plan settings”
Turn off hard disks: “Never”
USB Settings _ SUB Selective Suspend Setting:  Disabled

Does that cause any issues with drive wear?

[TheShoe]

I've noticed that if you wait, generally once the drive spins back up, Media Center will snap back without issue.

I have all of my drives (SMB shared, not via USB) sleep when not in use, both to drop power consumption and drop heat as they are in a 24-bay array and if they all spin continually, that's a lot of power/heat draw (and wear-n-tear).

How long have you waited when this happens?  For me, sometimes it has taken several seconds, although I have not counted to know exactly and "several" is just a guess.

[DJLegba]

Does that cause any issues with drive wear?

My music is on an external Hitachi spinning drive that has been running 24/7 since 2013. Hard Disk Sentinel is still reporting the health as "Excellent", although I may retire it this winter.

[htnut]

Does that cause any issues with drive wear?

One may argue that it’s more wear and tear powering down and spinning up, than to just leave them spinning while the PC is on.  Anyway, in most cases your HTPC isn’t running all the time. 

[TheShoe]

One may argue that it’s more wear and tear powering down and spinning up, than to just leave them spinning while the PC is on.  Anyway, in most cases your HTPC isn’t running all the time.

Maybe.  Mine are in a large 24-bay array in a rack server in the basement.  It's always on .  Wear and tear aside, my main concern was the heat, which is not good for any hardware.  I use smartmontools to monitor the storage array and the ambient temperature drops substantially when I have drives sleep.

Given how I also segment my content across 24 drives, it's rare I'm continually spinning up/down drives (it's not a striped solution where all drives need to be active - I use snapraid).

But to the original posters issue - I've never seen a crash with sleeping drives.  Just a delay when spinning back up which seems normal to me outside of SSDs

[JimH]

I just don't think wear and tear is relevant any longer.  Drives are pretty amazing.

[michael123]

In my system  drives go to standby, it is a NAS box and it is essential to keep power consumption lower as well as temperature.

JRiver does freeze, and I would prefer it will show some 'spinning up' message

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that eventually JRiver gets control back and starts the playback

[blgentry]

Maybe.  Mine are in a large 24-bay array in a rack server in the basement.  It's always on .  Wear and tear aside, my main concern was the heat, which is not good for any hardware. 

If your drive array is "too hot" while it's running, then the array needs to be adjusted in some way to achieve a safe operating temperature.  If the temperature is normal for drives, then it's fine "forever".  Turning drives on and off kills them faster than running them continuously.

Extreme heat is definitely bad for drives.  I'm aware of an incident where the room temperature got to approximately 140 degrees F.  Hundreds of drives (in disk arrays) probably reached temperatures 20 to 40 degrees higher than that.  Those drives mostly survived, but over the next 2 years or so, a huge number of them died and had to be replaced.  Something like 1 to 2 per week for about 2 years.

All of that said, please use whatever approach works best for you.  The above is from my experience in the enterprise IT world.

Take care,
Brian.

[JimH]

Turning drives on and off kills them faster than running them continuously.

May be true, but I'm not aware of any evidence of that.  Are you?

[blgentry]

May be true, but I'm not aware of any evidence of that.  Are you?

I do not have any studies to reference or any formal proof.  Most enterprise IT professionals have had similar experiences.  The last time we shut down our entire data center, we lost about a half dozen machines when we powered back up.  Anecdotal evidence for sure.  But I've experienced this numerous times over the past 30 years.

Brian.