How to prevent hardrives from pinning down

[hanzer]

I've recently put together a little server that uses two laptop hard drives in a ZFS mirror (specs below). These drives aggressively spin down every few seconds. Is there a way to prevent that? The machine is running smartd with this /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf:

/dev/ada0 -a -d auto -e standby,off
/dev/ada1 -a -d auto -e standby,off

It doesn't prevent the drives from spinning down. Any ideas?

Model Family:     Western Digital Black Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD5000LPLX-08ZNTT0
Serial Number:    WD-WX11A97055Z3
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 607f68dee
Firmware Version: 04.01A04
User Capacity:    500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2, ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 3b
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)

Model Family:     Western Digital Black Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD5000LPLX-22ZNTT0
Serial Number:    WD-WX71A880D0VU
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 6b3918f33
Firmware Version: 01.01A01
User Capacity:    500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2, ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 3b
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)

[hanzer]

Originally Posted by IdOp

Perhaps you can disable APM as per this link ? (Disabling APM may be too blunt of a tool however, depending.)

Sorry, I posted this in the wrong thread! It was meant for your question in the "prevent hard drives from spinning down" thread.

Nice hint, thanks! It looks like the ataidle port expired on 2018-12-31; it was obsoleted by camcontrol.

This seems to work:

# camcontrol devlist

<WDC WD5000LPLX-08ZNTT0 04.01A04>  at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (ada0,pass0)
<WDC WD5000LPLX-22ZNTT0 01.01A01>  at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (ada1,pass1)
<SanDisk Cruzer Fit 1.00>          at scbus2 target 0 lun 0 (pass2,da0)

# camcontrol apm 0:0:0 -l 250
# camcontrol apm 1:0:0 -l 250

In FreeBSD, what is a good way to run these commands every time the system starts?

[IdOp]

In FreeBSD, what is a good way to run these commands every time the system starts?

This I don't know as I'm not a FreeBSD user. Is there an rc.local or similar script? Hopefully a regular user will have some guidance.