Brian's Brain

Two and a half weeks ago, I told you that I'd reluctantly disabled HDD spindown on my Netgear (formerly Infant) ReadyNAS X6, because the NAS refused to keep the drives asleep. I've been doing some experimentation over the holidays in an attempt to identify (and resolve) the root cause(s), and I thought a follow-up might be appropriate (particularly since at least one of my readers explicitly asked for it).

Disconnecting the Ethernet cable didn't, as I suspected, fix the problem; whatever kept waking up the ReadyNAS immediately after it went to sleep was internal to the NAS, not the result of incoming network requests. I began by disabling all unnecessary services running on the unit:

• SqueezeCenter (since I don't have a Squeezebox)
• The iTunes Streaming Server, which I hadn't yet gotten around to exploring
• UPnP AV and the Home Media Streaming Server, neither of which any of my LAN's UPnP/DLNA-compliant clients were ever able to see.
• BitTorrent, and
• ReadyNAS Photos, because as you'll soon see I have other ways of accessing images stored on the NAS, and because I didn't want to install the necessary client software.

Unfortunately, none of these moves brought the desired end result. Next, following the suggestions in the ReadyNAS FAQ, I shut down the Bonjour (i.e. Zeroconf) and UPnP discovery services. Still, the ReadyNAS HDDs refused to remain spun down. The only other 'bullet' I had available to 'shoot', aside from disabling standard file protocols (CIFS, NFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP and HTTPS, and Rsync), was the TwonkyMedia Server (I'm currently running v4.4.9), an optional add-on that from lengthy past coverage you may remember I use to access NAS-housed content on game consoles, my Roku SoundBridge, and other network clients.

I disabled TwonkyMedia and rebooted the ReadyNAS to make sure the service was fully incapacitated. The HDDs spun down five minutes (per my particular configuration setting) after the startup sequence completed, and lo and behold they remained spun down (until I accessed the unit via its web browser interface, that is, but such behavior was to be expected). I'd found my culprit. But keeping TwonkyMedia shut off wasn't acceptable; I streamed music from the ReadyNAS all the time, and I also wanted to be able to view pictures stored on the device.

Per a lengthy discussion thread on the ReadyNAS community forum, I suspected that TwonkyMedia's configured 'search for new media' interval rate might be the transgressor. I'd had this value set to auto-search every 60 minutes, so as a hunch (after re-enabling TwonkyMedia and rebooting) I first completely disabled auto-search, assuming that I'd alternatively just kick off a manual search each time I saved new content to the device. No improvement, unfortunately...the ReadyNAS HDDs refused to remain spun down.

Time for another hunch, no matter how illogical it might seem. The other NAS on my network, Linksys' NAS200, also contains TwonkyMedia, in this particular case a custom version integrated within the device firmware. Its default auto-search interval is 1440 minutes (i.e. once every 24 hours), so I changed the ReadyNAS version's setting to match...and the HDDs subsequently spun down and stayed that way. I have no idea why this particular value works while others seem not to, but for what it's worth, I pass the data along to other Netgear/Infrant hardware owners. It should be applicable to all ReadyNAS variants, as they all run the same firmware.

In addition to avoiding the incremental wear and tear on HDD bearings and other mechanical parts resulting from repetitive and unnecessary spin-down and –up cycles, I also had a power consumption motivation for pursuing a solution to the problem. Product specifications document <100W maximum power consumption with all four HDD bays populated (as is the case in my situation, a RAID 5 configuration). Typical power draw estimates suggest that with the HDDs spun down, the ReadyNAS X6 consumes 35 W...with all four drives active, on the other hand, the ReadyNAS X6 typically burns 55W, a 50% higher figure.

The ReadyNAS X6, of course, burns no power when it's shut off. To wit, and in spite of my success to date I'm still seriously considering retiring it. Its Linksys NAS200 sibling is a comparative slowpoke, both by virtue of its lack of three- or four-drive RAID 5 striping and lack of a GbE network interface, but it does offer two-drive RAID 1 mirroring capabilities (note, I have not converted from journaled ext3 to the slightly faster albeit non-journaled XFS file system, as available in the latest firmware release). And frankly, considering that my network is dominated by Wi-Fi and HomePlug AV connections, much of the ReadyNAS's performance potential goes untapped, anyway.

TwonkyMedia in its default configuration exhibits a glitch with the Sony PlayStation 3 (but not the Xbox 360 or SoundBridge) regarding music library navigation. After selecting an artist, it's not possible to subsequently select a specific album; you're only offered all stored tracks corresponding to that artist. On the ReadyNAS, where I have full access to the TwonkyMedia settings, I worked around the PS3 shortcoming by defining a custom Artist/Album 'music tree' menu entry. Such flexibility isn't available on the NAS200's TwonkyMedia build, alas, but since I have my stored music directory-arranged by artist at the first level and corresponding albums at the second level, I can alternatively get to an album's worth of content via the folder tree navigation option. Or, if I feel very adventurous, I could alternatively try out an enthusiast-developed firmware image for the NAS200 which, among other claimed attributes, enables installation (and user upgrade) of a generic Linux build of TwonkyMedia.