Controllers: Spindown Support

[Isochroma]

I've been having fun with my PC's spindown support :) Using an A7V8X board with 3 different controllers and WinXP SP2. Found by experimentation that the BIOS must be set to spin drives down (after any time) and also Windows must be set (to the desireable time). If either is not set, no spindown occurs.

I have six drives running on the three controllers. Using careful file-copy on the same drive probing, I have determined which drives will spin down after the 1-minute idle timeout I've set in Windows' Power Options.

I accomplished this test by first waiting for the timeout; when I heard all the drives spin down, I then navigated to the root of the test drive and started duplicating a folder by CRTL key and drag-and-drop to the same drive, thus avoiding spinning up other drives.

In the list below, each line is one physical drive, listing the partitions on it first, then the verified spindown, and finally its controller. Drives in BOLD spun down, others didn't.

[C,I]....NO.....{Bus Number 0, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114]
[E,H]...NO.....{Bus Number 1, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114]
[F]......NO.....{Bus Number 3, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114]
[D].....YES...{Location 0(0)} [VIA Busmaster IDE Controller]
[L].....YES...{Location 0(0)} [VIA Busmaster IDE Controller]
[P].....YES...{Bus Number 0, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [Promise 1+0 Stripe/RAID0]

Conclusions

Silicon Image SiI3114 SATA Controller: NO: Driver: Silicon Image: 1.0.15.0
VIA Bus Master IDE Controller: YES: Driver: Microsoft: 5.1.2600.2180
Win XP Promise FastTrak 376: YES: Driver: Promise: 1.0.0.8

It seems that, excepting the FastTrak, Windows universally supports standard IDE controllers, and has much less support for spindown on SCSI controllers. It appears that each controller (and driver combination) must be tested on a case-by-case basis to determine its spindown capability under Windows.

In the case of the FastTrak, it is a dual SATA plus one IDE channel controller, integrated on the board. The single drive plugged into it is coincidentally IDE... I could plug a SATA drive into it but am too lazy. Also it has to be configured for RAID to make a drive show up, and my SATAs are full of data, so I don't want to risk it being wiped.

I do feel that it is safe to assume that all controllers which show up in Device Manager under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" will work, and that only some which show up under "SCSI and RAID controllers" will.

I've just purchased a VIA VT6410-based two-channel IDE controller from eBay, to verify the proposition. It will be tested on an IDE drive plugged in and held in my hand outside the case, for quick & easy verification.

If the IDE controller works with spindown, I'll be removing all my SATA drives and replacing them with IDE. The goal is to spin down every single drive in the machine while watching video at night.

I have a Gigabyte iRAM ramdisk with 1 GB in it which I will be upgraded to 4 GB today. The current 1 GB is being used by a pagefile; the extra 3 GB will be partitioned and used to store files for media playback, allowing the HDDs to be inactive and thus spun down. Each evening before starting movie nite, I just use my handy SendTo shortcut to send each file in turn from my storage drive to the iRAM.

Of course the boot is usually kept spun up regardless due to Windows' constant reads/writes. The next step is to replace this drive with flash SSD or a flash RAID. Since I'm using only 5 GB it will be easy.

I hope others can add to the list of controllers (and the driver source:version used!) which are know to work/not work with WinXP's spindown feature. If you post this information, please also post whether the driver shows as an IDE controller or SCSI/RAID controller in your Device Manager.

[Isochroma]

As evidence of my presumption that some controllers support WinXP's spindown and others do not, below I'll provide links to other sites/forums posts which provide others' experience:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RAID with power management?
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/13896 ... management

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage

All:

I'm running a Highpoint SATA RAID card under Windows XP Pro, and it works well enough I suppose (although the support is abysmal and the driver updates nearly undocumented). But it doesn't support windows power management, so the disks never spin down. 3Ware's web site indicates they don't either, and for a home server it's a real disadvantage having (multiple) disks spinning 24/7 - lots of heat and noise. Anyone know of any way to mirror a pair of drives under XP and get them to play nicely with power management?

Thanks,
jhd

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Internal additional Sata spin down
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.p ... opic=24303

Hello,

I have spent hours googling to find any internal SATA drive spin down solution. That's without any success

I hope that anyone here can give some useful hints.

The purpose is to add into my minitower 2 additional 300Gb SATA disk for archived data, which I access occasionally only, perhaps 1 - 3 times a day.

Due to case internal overheating, additonal drive and extra cooler noise I'd like to let these extra drives to spin down after 30 minutes of inactivity ...

Despite of some opinions here, it's expected also to lenghten drive life span too, as most cheaper modern SATA2 drives are designed for 5x8 and not for 24x7 work cycle.
And there are some more technical aspect why spinning down these extra drives might be wise.

Mobo is some Intel with ICH8R and drives might be Seagate ST3320620AS.
Windows XP with Intel Intel® Matrix Storage Raid installed for NCQ support but no Raid drives.
(Right now D965GF, but I can change it, as my PC is whenever neccessary under construction)

Building extra NAS seems to be waste of resources and room as all spin down functions might be already on desktop mobo.

Any ideas?
Robert

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

680i sata drives dont Spin down
http://evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=99977

Hi, hope this is a quick question to answer.

I have 4 SATA drives and 2 SATA dvd's in my machine.
Running Vista 64 Ultimate and have the power management set to turn off the hard drive after 3 minutes however the drives never power down.
I have indexing switched off as well as superfetch and can hear that there is no drive activity but still no spin down.

Is this common on the 680i board? Does any of you guys and Gals have a 680i board that is spinning down SATA disks when they are not used or am I missing something?

Cheers

Gregor

Oh yeah:-
680i P30 Bios
Q6600 G0 Processor
4 GB Geil memory
2* samsing 160HJ drives
1 * Sasmsung 160JJ Drive
1 * Samsung 501LJ drive
1 * Samsung DVD RW
1* Asus SATA DVD

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

seagate spin down test
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=386106

**Note: This post should have been labelled "Silicon Image SiI3112 spindown test. Too bad I found it two years after the last post. Hard drives almost all support spindown; it is the controller which is X Factor.

Ok I just recived my RMA drive seagate sata 200 gig ST3200822AS I ran some seagate windows test and it fail the spin down test .

SeaTools Online Acoustical Spin Down Test
Started at 9:17:49 PM on 3/12/2005.

Spinning down drive: Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATARaid Controller : ST320082 2AS SCSI Disk Device
Serial Number: WD-WMAKE1351212
Capacity: 200.05 GB
Drive spin-down failed.

What does this mean I have a bad drive?
__________________
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Processor Socket 939
DFI Lanparty UT NForce4 Ultra- D
Ultra / X2 Connect / 550-Watt
eVGA Geforce 7800GT 256
SATA 200 GIG Seagate
36G raptor
4x512 CORSAIR XMS 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200)
Thermaltake Xaser III V1420A Black Chassis:1.0mm SECC Japan Steel, Front Panel: All aluminum made ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

re: seagate spin down test
http://forums.pcper.com/showpost.php?s= ... stcount=41

I had the following and a complete scan of the hard drive showed nothing wrong.

It maybe a seatool bug?

SeaTools Online Acoustical Spin Down Test

Started at 6:14:11 PM on 3/20/2007.

Spinning down drive: Windows Promise SATA300 TX2plus (tm) IDE Controller : ST330062 2AS SCSI Disk Device

Serial Number:

Capacity: 300.07 GB

Drive spin-down failed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Internal additional Sata spin down
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.p ... opic=24303

Hello,

I have spent hours googling to find any internal SATA drive spin down solution. That's without any success

I hope that anyone here can give some useful hints.

The purpose is to add into my minitower 2 additional 300Gb SATA disk for archived data, which I access occasionally only, perhaps 1 - 3 times a day.

Due to case internal overheating, additonal drive and extra cooler noise I'd like to let these extra drives to spin down after 30 minutes of inactivity ...
Despite of some opinions here, it's expected also to lenghten drive life span too, as most cheaper modern SATA2 drives are designed for 5x8 and not for 24x7 work cycle.
And there are some more technical aspect why spinning down these extra drives might be wise.

Mobo is some Intel with ICH8R and drives might be Seagate ST3320620AS.
Windows XP with Intel Intel® Matrix Storage Raid installed for NCQ support but no Raid drives.
(Right now D965GF, but I can change it, as my PC is whenever neccessary under construction)

Building extra NAS seems to be waste of resources and room as all spin down functions might be already on desktop mobo.

Any ideas?
Robert

[Isochroma]

Reviewing my setup, and assuming that the VT6410 IDE controller supports spindown, I have three problem drives, all SATA.

[C,I]....NO.....{Bus Number 0, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114]
[E,H]...NO.....{Bus Number 1, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114]
[F]......NO.....{Bus Number 3, Target ID 0, LUN 0} [SiI3114]

The identities of these problem disks are:

[C,I]: < WDC WD36 0GD-00FNA0 > (Raptor 36 GB) [SATA]
[E,H]: < ST3320620AS > (Seagate 320 GB) [SATA]
[F]: < WDC WD16 00JD-00HBB0 > (WD 160 GB) [SATA]

Every night these metallic beasties whine their way into my beautiful video watching experience, degrading it to the extreme.

If F: is replaced, it will be with an IDE 320 GB Seagate. The P: drive, listed in my first post, is already spinning down but alas, it acts as backup for F:. Since F: will be upgraded to 320GB, so must P: also be upgraded to that size.

Now, lets look at the current IDE port situation, assuming the VT6410 controller is installed but as yet unused, and before any drives are changed:

1. Primary Master (integrated IDE): ST3320620A
2. Primary Slave (integrated IDE): Pioneer DVR-111D
3. Secondary Master (integrated IDE): Maxtor 98196H8
4. Secondary Slave (integrated IDE): EMPTY

5. Primary Master (VT6410): EMPTY
6. Primary Slave (VT6410): EMPTY
7. Secondary Master (VT6410): EMPTY
8. Secondary Slave (VT6410): EMPTY

9. Tertiary Master (Promise 376): WD 160 GB IDE

Note: The Promise 376's lone IDE port only supports a single master, and that only if it is RAIDed (with itself; it shows as "Promise 1+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI Disk Device). Since migrating drives on/off this proprietary port is troublesome, I plan to avoid using it in the future. So the current 160 GB WD drive will be moved onto either chipset or VT6410.

It is now apparent that there will be 5 ports available, but wait! That Maxtor 80 GB is a crappy 5400 RPM noisy beast which is totally full of audio; it is backing up the primary audio copy on E:. The primary audio folder on E: will be moved to F: after acquisition of the new 320 IDE, and will be synced to its backup P: automatically, thus the Maxtor is history, toast, a goner, etc. It will be removed and used as a doorstop, thus freeing up a port!

So 5 ports until both F: and P: are migrated to new drives, then six afterwards. And since replacement of those drives will take at most three ports, there will be no problems so long as the VT6410 works. If it doesn't, there will be problems, which will mean testing new IDE controllers.

But wait... what about:

[C,I]: < WDC WD36 0GD-00FNA0 > (Raptor 36 GB) [SATA] ?

The C is boot, and boot means problems, in particular spindown issues. Windows uses C: just way too much, so buying some cheap IDE drive and moving my C: over to it won't be much help, if any at all.

That is where the MTRON Flash SSD comes in. They're selling on eBay (with shipping) for about $700 CDN right now. This is the device of choice because of its high speed and excellent rewriteability, and so the budget stands thusly:

$230: two new 320 GB IDE Seagates
$700: one 16 GB MTRON Flash SSD [eBay]

I decided to cheap out and skip replacing P: temporarily, because there's still 80 GB free on F: and P:, which means a 160 GB backup drive will be OK for a while.

A bit off topic for the storage section, but after all this there's just one more item to replace: the 120mm case fan has a whining sound so a Late Yoon (or was that Yate Loon?) will be acquired for a measly cost.

[Isochroma]

Today I've had some more thoughts on why spindown works on all IDE controllers but only on some SCSI (ie. SATA) ones.

The idea is that the IDE controller isn't doing any translation, it is just passing the standard ATA commands sent from Windows directly to the devices:

Windows (ATA command sent) -> IDE Controller (ATA command pass-thru) -> IDE HDD (ATA command executed)

Now with a SCSI controller which physically connects to real SCSI drives:

Windows (SCSI command sent) -> SCSI Controller (SCSI command pass-thru) -> SCSI HDD (SCSI command executed)

Now with a SATA or even IDE controller whose driver pretends it is a SCSI controller:

Windows (SCSI command sent) -> 'SCSI' Controller (SCSI command translated to ATA) -> IDE HDD (ATA command executed)


We see now why case three might be problematic. Either the driver software or the device of such a lying controller, must translate SCSI commands received from Windows into ATA commands for the HDD to receive.

The basic command set usually works fine, but certain extra commands like spindown, get/set certain registers, etc. may be troublesome to translate. For example, SCSI drives probably have different registers, different number of them, etc. But most if not all of these 'extra' commands aren't necessary for operation of the drive, so either the driver or device is programmed to 'not implement' these commands. Rather than offer an incomplete implementation, many controller manufacturers have instead decided to offer no implementation at all.

Using the Windows port of hdparm, I yesterday sent a command to one of my 'SCSI' SATA drives to spindown, and got the reply "command not implemented".

It is not impossible for such translations to be implemented, but they are not guaranteed as with an IDE controller whose driver shows it to Windows as such. It seems my Promise 376 RAID controller does indeed implement at least the spindown command. It also seems that Silicon Image has been lazy on their SiI3112 & SiI3114 controllers: user reports indicate neither supports spindown. Both are 'lying' controllers which pretend to be SCSI for Windows but are SATA on the other side.

I believe controllers' spindown support is important because it is the key to obtaining a quiet or even 'silent' PC without having to make extensive physical modifications to the HDD mounting system.

Current-generation SATA controllers are dominant, and almost without exception run in 'native' mode. Their drivers expose SCSI interfaces to Windows; often incomplete interfaces, it turns out.

The missing parts almost always include APM and temperature command translation, locking users out of the potential benefits of spindown and temperature monitoring, both important capabilities for silent PCs in particular.

[Isochroma]

Here is another thread about the same issue:

Internal additional Sata spin down
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.p ... opic=24303

[Isochroma]

And here is a very interesting article on SATA shutdown:

http://linux-ata.org/shutdown.html

When a disk is powered off, it needs to flush its write cache and then unload its heads so that they don't crash onto the recording surfaces. Most disks have mechanical mechanism to unload its heads even when power is abruptly cut. This is usually called emergency unload and causes popping sound on some disks and may have negative effect on the lifetime of the disk, so the operating system must tell the disks to unload the heads prior to shutting the system down.

In ATA, this is achieved by issuing FLUSH CACHE followed by STANDBYNOW and the IDE drivers (drivers/ide/*) have always issued the sequence prior to powering off. libata uses SCSI sd driver as its high level disk driver and the sd driver, unfortunately, issues only the cache flush command during shutdown. This is mainly because SCSI disks can be accessed by multiple initiators (hosts) and spinning down disks because one initiator goes down can disturb others. Because of this implementation detail, libata drivers up to kernel version 2.6.21 don't issue the STANDBYNOW command before powering off.

This is yet more evidence that in fact many if not most 'SCSI' real/fake controllers do not translate / passthru HDD power down commands.

[Isochroma]

Yet more...

https://secure.sccs.swarthmore.edu/pipe ... 06338.html

(putting this back on slug...)

Dan wrote:

> Actually, now that I look at it again, it looks like sdparm was
> failing silently at putting the disk in standby mode.

Yeah, I was a little surprised when you said that sdparm was putting your
drive to sleep successfully, but chalked my surprise up to running an
older kernel.

At least as of 2.6.10, libata just doesn't support ATA command
pass-through, which is necessary to do things like set timeouts, spin down
the disk, run SMART tests, etc. This is hell of obnoxious, for obvious
reasons, but will hopefully be fixed Sometime Soon.

I'm not familiar enough with libata's architecture (or SATA, for that
matter) to know whether or not support would also needed to be added to
individual chipset drivers, but for now, it's sort of a moot point.

--b

Commentary
---------------

ATA command pass-thru, eh? My initial suspicions are confirmed :) Obviously in this case the OS libata driver is at fault, like so many Windows drivers, by failing to pass the ATA powerdown command to the drive(s).

[Isochroma]

[wurlug] SATA power management
http://lists.nluug.nl/pipermail/wurlug/ ... 01131.html

I got the same problem, using a 2nd sata drive only as backup.
Unfortunately, I have not found a solution yet...
As I understand it, sata does support spindown but the ioctl function is not
implemented in the libata driver

Joost.


Olivier Sessink writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I have two SATA disks in my computer, and one of those is fairly
> inactive most of the time, so I would like it to spin down after a
> while. But hdparm cannot do that for SATA disks. Is there some other
> utility that can spindown SATA disks ?
>
> thanks,
> Olivier
> _______________________________________________
> Wurlug mailing list
> Wurlug at lists.nluug.nl
> http://lists.nluug.nl/mailman/listinfo/wurlug

[Isochroma]

Ah, finally! The definitive document:

SCSI/ATA Power Management
http://sg.torque.net/sg/power.html

"Those states marked with "**" are the resultant power condition state after a START STOP UNIT (start=0) SCSI command has been executed. For (s)ATA devices the SCSI-ATA Translation draft (SAT at www.t10.org) specifies a translation to the STANDBY ATA command in this situation."

[Isochroma]

Good News!

Today my VT6410 two-channel PATA IDE controller arrived from eBay!

So I popped it into a free PCI slot and hooked up a disused 30GB Maxtor IDE, and whaddya know it spins down!

the silence was roaring
as my hard drives were snoring
even the Max on its spindle stacks
a final repeal of the noise tax

Strangely, I couldn't install the VIA Falcon IDE package (210A), so I used the VIA V-RAID driver version 5.60A. Windows XP SP2 doesn't have a builtin driver for this card, btw.

The install for the V-RAID driver went perfectly; note that this is running on Windows XP SP2 on x86 platform, ASUS A7V8X mainboard.

Driver: http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?Pa ... bCatID=116

VT6410 Cards on eBay: ebay link

EDIT by Mod: fixed the 3-mile-long link for you

[jojo4u]

Using a ICH7DH and a 2,5" SATA Fujitsu disk with/without AHCI, I can use hdparm to spin down in Windows w/o problems.

[Isochroma]

without using hdparm, will Windows own power management spin your drive down?

also, is your SATA controller (ICH integrated) running in native SATA or IDE mode? You can check by going to Device Manager, and finding if your controller shows up under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" (IDE emulation mode), or "SCSI and RAID controllers" (native mode).

[Segmajom]

I use hdparm for spin down my HD501LJ and I have written a script remove the drive letters before go into standby mode (in DISKPART: select drive = x, remove driveletter (or letter?) = g).
Only one problem: after few hours hdd rise. (Perhaps due to SMART?)

SM

[Isochroma]

Yesterday I put my new Seagate 500GB IDE drive into service! Also according to plan, I removed three SATA drives which weren't spinning down. The new drive is on the chipset IDE controller and spins down nicely.

So at night when I'm watching video, only the Raptor is still spun up. The noise difference is noticeable, but not massive.

The next step is purchasing an 8GB compactflash and CF-SATA adapter. Then, in the evening before starting to watch video, I'll copy all the files I want to watch to the CF. This is to prevent rewrite wear on the expensive MTRON flash drive used for booting, which will never hold media files.

For now I'm watching files thru the gigabit LAN to keep the new drive spun down.

[Isochroma]

Great news!

I just installed my new Bidirectional SATA-IDE adapter between my chipset primary IDE port and Rator SATA drive.

Here is the link to buy these (ridiculously cheap at $3 too!):

High speed SATA IDE Bilateral Adapter Converter New

EDIT by Mod: fixed the 3-mile-long link for you, again.

And of course, windows spins the boot down too! With no drives spinning, the system is GHOSTLY QUIET.

BUT, explorer.exe inevitably spins it up about 30 seconds latter. So I terminated explorer, and it doesn't spin up!

So each evening I'll terminate explorer after launching Media Player Classic to play my videos.

This is just a temporary setup until the MTRON SSD arrives.

The one disadvantage is it takes an entire IDE port, unless you have a cable adapter that can handle the female plug on the adapter. Plus its device always shows as master, so it wouldn't be possible to plug two of these devices into a single port.

[jojo4u]

without using hdparm, will Windows own power management spin your drive down?
also, is your SATA controller (ICH integrated) running in native SATA or IDE mode? You can check by going to Device Manager, and finding if your controller shows up under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" (IDE emulation mode), or "SCSI and RAID controllers" (native mode).

I can't check the windows spin-down since it's my only drive. You are right, it shows up under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" altough I switched to AHCI in the BIOS. Besides a Intel Ultra-ATA Storage Controllers I can see a "Intel 82801GBM SATA AHCI Controller" in this category.

EDIT: Disabling the legacy IDE channel leaves only the AHCI Controller in the category. I'll install the complete intel drivers now.
EDIT2: The driver was slipstreamed using nlite. Installing the complete Matrix Storage Driver and even deinstalling the Controller in the Device Manager didn't bringt me native mode apparently. Did somebody manage this with a i945GM?