Disk spin-down not working on Seagate IronWolf Pro

simon-77 · September 2, 2023, 8:39am

Hey, I had an issue on my Rockstor system regarding a HDD not spinning down and I would like to share my findings and workaround.

I have 2 drives in my new Rockstor system:

Seagate IronWolf Pro
Toshiba N300 NAS

Both are 18TB in capacity, SATA-III and are fairly new models (bought in 2023).

For the Toshiba N300 NAS drive I was able to configure the spin-down settings via Rockstor Web-UI and everything worked as expected.

But the Seagate IronWolf Pro drive was not configurable via Rockstor Web-UI.
The APM column only shows ???, the Power Status is unknown and I can’t press the hour-glass symbol:

And also querying the APM level with hdparm manually showed that this is not supported:
Screenshot_20230902_100244

Doing some search on the internet revealed many people with similar issues on Seagate IronWolf & Seagate IronWolf Pro HDDs.
It seems that Seagate has its own tool for power management: SeaChest Utility

openSeaChest:
There is also a open-source version of this tool: openSeaChest
I found this blog entry helpful as guidance for my workaround on Rockstor: Spinning down Seagate Hard Drives in Ubuntu 20.04 - André Jacobs

My workaround:

I was not keen on installing openSeaChest from source on a “production” system, so I downloaded the pre-built binaries form the latest release: Releases · Seagate/openSeaChest · GitHub
File: openSeaChest-v23.03.1-linux-x86_64-portable.tar.xz

copy tar-ball to Rockstor via SSH ($ scp openSeaChest-... root@hostname:)
extract tar-ball on Rockstor (# tar xf openSeaChest-...)
enter the new directory to execute the binaries for setup.
./openSeaChest_Info --scan - list all devices
./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg0 --showEPCSettings - show the timers for drive sg0
./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg0 --idle_c 600000 --standby_z 1200000 - modify the timers for drive sg0 (idle_c: 60 minutes; standby_z - aka spin-down: 20 minutes)

To check the current power state of all HDDs use ./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d all --checkPowerMode

With:
Device is in the PM1: Idle state = spinning disk
Device is in the PM2: Standby state = not spinning disk

Although some manual steps are involved, this now works for me and these PowerControl settings also survive a reboot.

Cheers Simon

phillxnet · September 2, 2023, 11:28am

@simon-77 Thanks for sharing your findings on this one. And a nice bit of investigation there.

I did have some much smaller Seagate IronWolf (non pro) drives, 4 TB I think they were, but no longer have access to those drives unfortunately. They did work as expected, so likely this is a more recent ‘thing’. Shame.

Yes, this is our cue to leave well alone and disable the Web-UI options in this area for given drive:

github.com

rockstor/rockstor-core/blob/master/src/rockstor/system/osi.py#L1618-L1635


      
          def get_disk_power_status(dev_byid):
              """
              When given a disk name such as that stored in the db ie /dev/disk/by-id
              type we return it's current power state via hdparm -C
              /dev/disk/by-id/<dev_byid> Possible states are:
              unknown - command not supported by disk
              active/idle - normal operation
              standby - low power mode, ie drive motor not active ie -y will do this
              sleeping - lowest power mode, completely shut down ie -Y will do this
              N.B. -C shouldn't spin up a drive in standby but has been reported to wake
              a drive from sleeping but we aren't going to invoke sleeping as pretty much
              any request will wake a fully sleeping drive.
              Drives in 'sleeping' mode typically require a hard or soft reset before
              becoming available for use, the kernel does this automatically however.
              :param dev_byid: disk name as stored in db / Disk model ie without path
              :return: single word sting of state as indicated by hdparm -C /dev/<disk>
              and if we encounter an error line in the output we return unknown.
              """

And we set the disk spindown via:

github.com

rockstor/rockstor-core/blob/4d60a2c683140aaa10a8e5b201157163cc9a898b/src/rockstor/system/osi.py#L1694-L1714


      
          def set_disk_spindown(
              dev_byid, spindown_time, apm_value, spindown_message="no comment"
          ):
              """
              Takes a value to be used with hdparm -S to set disk spindown time for the
              device specified.
              Executes hdparm -S spindown_time and ensures the systemd script to do the
              same on boot is also updated. Note we do not restart the systemd service
              to enact these changes in order to keep drive intervention to a minimum.
              :param dev_byid: The name of a disk device as used in the db ie by-id type
              without a path.
              :param spindown_time: Integer received from settings form ie 240
              :param apm_value: value to be used with hdparm's -B parameter to set the
              drives APM level. Should be between 1-255 and will be ignored if not. When
              ignored there will be no hdparm -B executed and no -B switch added to the
              relevant systemd line.
              :param spindown_message: message received from drop down as human presented
              selection, used later in systemd script to retrieve previous setting.
              :return: False if an hdparm command was not possible ie inappropriate dev,
              or an error was return by the command, True otherwise.
              """

Which in turn configures/reconfigures the rockstor-hdparm systemd service to enable consistency over power cycling.

Just noting the above in case a little development in the testing channel takes your fancy :).

Thanks again for the heads up on this one. And for sharing your fix/work-around. Indicentally have you ensured that the settings, thus applied, survive a power-cycle. I think hdparm settings survive a reboot but not a power cycle (from memory at least). Hence our use of our dedicated systemd service to re-establish them on boot.

simon-77 · September 2, 2023, 7:31pm

I just checked it:
this setting also survives a power-cycle (and this setting is also supposed to be persistent).

aremiaskfa · September 2, 2023, 7:34pm

Thanks for posting your findings here!

@phillxnet I also have a ironwolf pro with the same affliction. Posting just in case you need testers in the future

petrosl · November 29, 2023, 7:13am

Thanks for sharing your work, later today I will try to replicate it and I hope that it will work for me as well

Tex1954 · November 30, 2023, 4:06am

@petrosl Welcome aboard! I also have 5 4TB IronWolf drives that work fine in one setup, but I disable SpinDown normally. However, I may try it in the future!

Also, don’t forget to get your Rockstor case badge!!!

Update: Seems I can’t change the spin-down setting after the pool and share are created… hmmm…
Will have to clear it all and test it then. I’ll let you know for sure on my 4TB drives.

Tex1954 · December 10, 2023, 2:27pm

Okay, after the last update, the problems activating spin down went away… interesting. I set all five IronWolf drives to APM 40 and 5 min spin down and it works perfectly. The drives were then set back to no spin down and again had a small glitch. Then I got weird errors setting the drives back to no spin down and then it flat stopped working all together… Working on a video…

12/17/23 Update:

Well, had numerous updates lately and seems like all but the last 2 changed things… I will update with pictures later as time permits, but there is definitely something glitchy going on.

Tex1954 · January 28, 2024, 8:15pm

Okay, been busy and seems every update for the last few weeks changed what I was seeing. Then, the 5.0.6 .0 update came in and I am finally getting some repeatable and fairly consistent results.

First look after shutdown/restart:

The drives come up and the status is unknown for some reason. Then I turn off the SMART stuff and status comes back:

Then I turn on the SMART stuff again and everything seems okay…until I log out.
When I log back in, it is all greyed out again as in the first picture.

These are all Seagate IronWolf drives, all 4TB, all same model.

I don’t know if this is a timing problem with the Rockstor WebUI or not. In any case, willing to try anything to help out…

Maybe CLI checks would be more consistent, don’t know. BUT, I did try the spindown stuff and it seemed to work, but the status has been screwing up all along complicating things. Even changing out a suspect drive made no difference.

Cheers!

2/14/24:

Noticed this stuff in the Rockstor log regarding trying to read status on all the IronWolf drives in the backup setup… BTW, it’s otherwise running fine… just the Disk Status is wonkers…

[14/Feb/2024 20:01:40] ERROR [smart_manager.data_collector:1010] Failed to update disk state… exception: Exception while setting access_token for url(http://127.0.0.1:8000): HTTPConnectionPool(host=‘127.0.0.1’, port=8000): Read timed out. (read timeout=2). content: None
[14/Feb/2024 20:01:42] ERROR [smart_manager.data_collector:1010] Failed to update pool state… exception: Exception while setting access_token for url(http://127.0.0.1:8000): HTTPConnectionPool(host=‘127.0.0.1’, port=8000): Read timed out. (read timeout=2). content: None
[14/Feb/2024 20:01:44] ERROR [smart_manager.data_collector:1010] Failed to update share state… exception: Exception while setting access_token for url(http://127.0.0.1:8000): HTTPConnectionPool(host=‘127.0.0.1’, port=8000): Read timed out. (read timeout=2). content: None
[14/Feb/2024 20:01:46] ERROR [smart_manager.data_collector:1010] Failed to update snapshot state… exception: Exception while setting access_token for url(http://127.0.0.1:8000): HTTPConnectionPool(host=‘127.0.0.1’, port=8000): Read timed out. (read timeout=2). content: None

I think the first error is most pertinent as regards the disk status bug…

EmptyNas · November 14, 2024, 5:32pm

Hello there,
my 4x 4TB Seagate Iron wolf Pro also do not show the Power value in the UI.
But using openSeaChest I could set the values and the drives are spinning down.
Thanks for the information.

Mark93 · November 30, 2024, 9:52pm

Hey, I had the same problem for a long time and found a solution which is properly reflected in the GUI. At least it looks like this for now.

(First Seagate drive)

Disable all EPC timers:

./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d all --idle_a disable
./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d all --idle_b disable
./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d all --idle_c disable
./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d all --standby_z disable

It survives a reboot and powercycle
Found it here: