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[demoleon]

I have set up my NAS to spin down the drives after 5 min. of no activity.  Since then JRiver hasn't been working too well.  Initially I had play from memory checked.  That didn't work at all so I turned that off (as indicated on other posts.)  I also had an issue with my DLNA control point (BubbleUPnP) timing out while waiting for the disks to spin up on the initial track.  That has been solved too but I am still having trouble.  This morning I was listening to a CD and one track in the middle of the album had a delay and stutter as if the disk had spun down mid playlist.  I noticed that the track before this one was longer than my disk spin down time (5 min.)  Now I can increase that parameter but I listen to a lot of classical and can have tracks 20-30+ minutes long.  And anyway I thought that once I turned off play from memory JRiver should just be streaming my tracks with a few seconds of buffer and there should be no inactivity mid playlist (especially 5 minutes of inactivity.)  What am I missing here?

Thanks,
John

[mwillems]

I'm not sure what is exactly going on in your case, but my experience has been that setting drives to spin down at all can be kind of a dicey proposition.

For systems on mains power (as opposed to laptops), the power savings are not very significant unless you have a very large number of drives that are both a) on 24/7 and b) idle for substantial periods of time.  Modern NAS drives use about 3 to 4 watts when spinning and about half a watt when parked/spun down.  If you left four drives spinning idle for a year, your incremental energy use (over parking them and having them draw .5 watt each for the year) would be about 30 kWhs, which (where I live) is about $3 per year of energy savings.

And if it were "free" from a performance and wear-and-tear perspective that might be worth doing ($3 is $3, right?), but spinning down at short intervals seems to hurt performance.  And there's evidence that spinning down drives and parking the heads constantly causes more wear and tear on the drive than just spinning constantly (i.e. it's harder on bearings and motors to stop and start frequently than it is to just keep moving).  For example many NAS drives are only rated to a certain number (500k or 600k) of "load cycles."  Every time you park the head you're incrementing that "load cycle count."  If it only goes up by a few a day, the drive will fail from normal wear and tear before you ever hit 500k, but if you're incrementing it 20 times an hour, 10 hours a day, you could wind up wearing out the drive a year or two early.   

My advice is roll back the spin down to an hour or two hours, or just turn it off entirely (which is what I do).

[Dr Tone]

I'm not sure what is exactly going on in your case, but my experience has been that setting drives to spin down at all can be kind of a dicey proposition.

For systems on mains power (as opposed to laptops), the power savings are not very significant unless you have a very large number of drives that are both a) on 24/7 and b) idle for substantial periods of time.  Modern NAS drives use about 3 to 4 watts when spinning and about half a watt when parked/spun down.  If you left four drives spinning idle for a year, your incremental energy use (over parking them and having them draw .5 watt each for the year) would be about 30 kWhs, which (where I live) is about $3 per year of energy savings.

And if it were "free" from a performance and wear-and-tear perspective that might be worth doing ($3 is $3, right?), but spinning down at short intervals seems to hurt performance.  And there's evidence that spinning down drives and parking the heads constantly causes more wear and tear on the drive than just spinning constantly (i.e. it's harder on bearings and motors to stop and start frequently than it is to just keep moving).  For example many NAS drives are only rated to a certain number (500k or 600k) of "load cycles."  Every time you park the head you're incrementing that "load cycle count."  If it only goes up by a few a day, the drive will fail from normal wear and tear before you ever hit 500k, but if you're incrementing it 20 times an hour, 10 hours a day, you could wind up wearing out the drive a year or two early.   

My advice is roll back the spin down to an hour or two hours, or just turn it off entirely (which is what I do).

+1

[fitbrit]

+2