spin down an MD raid array?

[skyking]

Has anyone here ever set that up? I was just wondering if that was doable, but it frankly scares the crap out of me to try on anything but a test box. The possibility of it coming back 'dirty' .....yikes.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't think you'd set the spindown time the array itself but the individual drives with hdparm. And you'd probably have to set laptop mode on and maybe tell the filesystem to wait longer than the default for journal flushes.

And I also don't know if the spinup time would be too long and cause md to think the drives failed.

 

[skyking]

that spinup time and coordination was what worried me.

 

[Red Squirrel]

You could try to take it offline first but it will probably fail due to files in use etc... personally I would not try to spin down or shut off an array. Any reason you need to do this?

 

[skyking]

backup server.... I could set an event to shut it down and then Wake On Lan every day but that would be a PITA as well.

 

[Red Squirrel]

That's what I do for my backup server, I have my other server send a WOL packet to it, then on the backup server itself it's scheduled to run the backup job and after the job it shuts down. Once I code a better backup program (basically a front end to rsync) I will probably just run the backups right off my main server using one of those HDD docking stations. Once it detects a backup drive it will run the job then send a report once the job is done.

 

[skyking]

have you ever looked at the dirvish links I posted?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah it looks quite interesting, will need to look at implimenting that as well. My system will probably allow to manage multiple solutions at once.