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[vishnumrao]

This is intended as a feature request:

Can Dlink add a feature to have the DNS-323 go into a scheduled sleep or hibernate or shutdown and then power back up at a scheduled time.

Here is the idea: The NAS goes into a hibernate or sleep mode (not just disks spinning down but a full system sleep) at some time of users choice and then turns back ON at another user set time.

Here is the reason why I ask for this feature (I am sure many other might be in the same situation). My NAS sits in my bedroom. When I have torrents running on the NAS, the disks don't spin down. Thus, when I am sleeping, I can hear the occasional drive read/write happening and the fan running. Currently to avoid this noise, I have to manually turn OFF the NAS at night and then turn ON the NAS in the morning. If the system had a feature where the system goes into sleep, it would turn off the NAS without user intervention.

Hope Dlink implements this feature.

[gunrunnerjohn]

Why not just move the NAS to a place where you won't hear it?  It can be anywhere on the network.  I have some network disks in the basement in a cinder-block enclosure, better protection.

[vishnumrao]

Living in a 1 bedroom apartment has its space limitations!

The cable from my internet provider is in my bedroom and my router too sits there. So setting the NAS box next to the router is the easiest option rather than have CAT5 cables being routed all around my apartment.

When I buy a house, I will consider putting in my basement. Thanks!

[gunrunnerjohn]

Put it in the closet.

[vishnumrao]

That won't work either. That will require CAT wires being route to the opposite corner of the room.

I think a software solution is the best solution, hence the feature request.

[gunrunnerjohn]

If you have a pretty new box, you can use a simple lamp timer to turn it off at night and back on in the morning.  The original hardware doesn't support this, but the new hardware does.

[jamieburchell]

Is turning a hard drive off mid-write without unmounting the file system a good idea? If you have an iPod/iPhone there's a handy DNS-323 app that let's you turn it off/reset. You would need to turn it on again though. Not sure it really saves any effort. You could probably get the box to shutdown by using cron and FFP but good luck trying to get it to turn on again, and this would require a third party hack. Can you configure the torrents to start and stop at specific times? Or perhaps configure the router to switch off if yours supports that, or switch off the internet between those times. That may cause the NAS to give up downloading and hibernate.

[gunrunnerjohn]

Actually, maybe CRON would work.  You turn the box off with CRON, then later you kill it's power and then start it up again with the timer.  Don't know if that would trigger the power fail recovery, never had the urge to try.

[vishnumrao]

Turning OFF the power to a hard drive while its ON and spinning!!! I don't think its a good idea. I work in the HDD industry. I know how bad it is to the drive.

CRON is a good option. Don't have the linux coding skills for that.

[dosborne]

I suspect that there is little demand for this and it will never get implemented.

Turning a device ON requires that it never really turns OFF to begin with as the internal processing still must run for the O/S, timer etc.

What about requesting that the BT torrent have a proper schedule and as such it would be possible to say that between x and y times the BT does not run? This would allow the unit to sleep, powering down the drives. The fan would only run if the temp required it to be on.

This is somewhat possible with the FFP hack, but it would be nice to have it implemented in the legit BT/FW.

[vishnumrao]

Fully agree with you! Scheduling the BT to halt between specific times is a great idea. BT stops, hdds spindown and all's fine! Still there is idle power draw from the outlets (power draw at idle is not much, but still there is some draw). System sleep still is a good feature I believe.

Transmission 2.03 has the feature to limit download times. One more reason to install fun_plug. I already have, but have not managed to get transmission working. Gotta give it a shot again!

[gunrunnerjohn]

Maybe you could use CRON to simply pause BT so the NAS would sleep during those hours.  It's not really necessary to power down the NAS, that introduces a number of complications.

A CRON line to kill the BT process and another to start it again should do the trick.

[vishnumrao]

@jamieburchell. Thats what I meant. If power is turned off during a write operation, it could cause a bad write or an off track write, damaging data on the track or adjacent tracks.

When a hard drive is spinning and the heads are floating over the disks, the code goes through a planned sequence of events during power down. Consisting of unloading the heads and spinning down the heads. But in the case of power being cut off to the drive, the hardware on the drive, tries to retract the head back to its latch and spindown. But this process is ****e to errors and one could end up with a head sitting on the disk. This can cause a scratch on the disk, next time the drive powers up. This is disastrous because it damages the head totally.

@gunrunnerjohn, Transmission already provides the feature to stop BT downloads at specific times. I guess this is one more reason to install Transmission and fun_plug.

Thanks for all your replies.

[gunrunnerjohn]

In that case, I'd simply use Transmission.