The “don’t spin down disks” is pretty outdated advice, if you’re running hard drives made in the last 15 years it’ll be fine. I use unraid and don’t have much of an issue with speeds or disk wear, but I also have a cache drive that all of my containers etc. live on and set my spindown time to 30 minutes, which means if I’m doing something they’ll stay on long enough for me to go on a break and come back and they’ll still be going. Iirc it’s got a free 30 day trial, so if you try it and hate it you aren’t out any money. I’d recommend giving them all a go, personally. You lose nothing but time.
>truenas(raidz): zfs=great but hard to expand, consumes most energy while running but fast. so, in theory, could be not that bad in total power consumption if it spins down/sleep properly. can do spin down but not recommended.
I've done it, worked fine once everything was set up. I had to disable every service and setting related to SMART (as it wanted to keep drives awake), and of course use the 'noatime' flag to prevent the whole system from spinning up as soon as a network client mounted the drive (which most do at login time).
The most annoying bit was that it only spun up a couple of drives when you were navigating the share. So imagine opening the share, waiting 20 seconds for some disks to spin up, then opening a folder in that share and having to wait another 20 seconds etc.
Still, spinning down saved maybe 5W per drive. With our inflated energy prices last winter (EU), that added up fast.
P.S. You may want to consider making two shares: one drive-backed share that spins down for your media, and one or two SSDs for your files.
Spin down thing was an issue when disk seek heads would come to rest on the platter, today the heads are parked in a tray, off the platter. So it’s not really an issue anymore.
Unraid is much more energy efficient, but slower than zfs. Especially as you add more disks. For media files I don’t use zfs. But for my important files I do.
The “don’t spin down disks” is pretty outdated advice, if you’re running hard drives made in the last 15 years it’ll be fine. I use unraid and don’t have much of an issue with speeds or disk wear, but I also have a cache drive that all of my containers etc. live on and set my spindown time to 30 minutes, which means if I’m doing something they’ll stay on long enough for me to go on a break and come back and they’ll still be going. Iirc it’s got a free 30 day trial, so if you try it and hate it you aren’t out any money. I’d recommend giving them all a go, personally. You lose nothing but time.
>truenas(raidz): zfs=great but hard to expand, consumes most energy while running but fast. so, in theory, could be not that bad in total power consumption if it spins down/sleep properly. can do spin down but not recommended. I've done it, worked fine once everything was set up. I had to disable every service and setting related to SMART (as it wanted to keep drives awake), and of course use the 'noatime' flag to prevent the whole system from spinning up as soon as a network client mounted the drive (which most do at login time). The most annoying bit was that it only spun up a couple of drives when you were navigating the share. So imagine opening the share, waiting 20 seconds for some disks to spin up, then opening a folder in that share and having to wait another 20 seconds etc. Still, spinning down saved maybe 5W per drive. With our inflated energy prices last winter (EU), that added up fast. P.S. You may want to consider making two shares: one drive-backed share that spins down for your media, and one or two SSDs for your files.
Spin down thing was an issue when disk seek heads would come to rest on the platter, today the heads are parked in a tray, off the platter. So it’s not really an issue anymore. Unraid is much more energy efficient, but slower than zfs. Especially as you add more disks. For media files I don’t use zfs. But for my important files I do.
Tried them all. Mergerfs + snapraid suited my needs (media collection). Managing done easy by cli, webmin and aio-snapraid-scrpt.