I'm setting up a server that will need to be accessible 24/7 but will be rarely accessed (archive storage). To save heat/power, I'm thinking of setting hard disks to spin down using hdparm.
However, I wondered if this could cause unreliability as the storage is a Linux RAID 10 array. i.e. could delay in spinning up cause a drive to be kicked out of the array. Any experiences/war stories on this?
Best Answer
I've done this with a Linux raid-5 array, and never had any trouble from it sync-wise. There was a noticeable lag when the drives would spin up, about 45 seconds or so. Power-wise, though, I've decided it wasn't really worth it. The server consumed 90 watts when the drives were spinning (it was build with power consumption in mind), and 70 when they were spun down. That difference didn't justify the wait time from spinning them back up.