How to keep HDDs spun down when no sync is in progress?

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1

Hi, I found some similar topics but without a proper solution.

At the moment I have a BitTorrent Sync 1.4.111 setup with the following devices:

  • 1x NAS (HP N54L with Debian Stable) - only on if needed
  • 1x Pi 1B (Raspbian) - always on
  • 1x Tower PC (Windows 10) - only on if needed
  • 3x Notebook (Ubuntu / Debian Unstable / Debian Unstable) - only on if needed
  • 1x Pi 1B (Raspbian) - offsite in my parents’ house - always on

Despite some minor glitches this has been working really well for several years now. Nevertheless, this version is very old and the current Resilio Sync does not work properly on the old Pi systems.

Therefore I am currently thinking of migrating everything to Syncthing. I did a test with one Pi, one Notebook and my Tower PC. It worked quite well and I love the Web GUI, but I did not manage to keep the Pi’s external HD spun down when there was no sync activity. I did the obvious and set the rescan interval to some long time, but this did not help.

The Pi has a SD card for its system (read-only) and everything else (data and syncthing itself including configuration and database) resides on the external HD.

Has anyone managed to keep the HDDs spun down without moving everything to an SSD or RAM Disk?

2

If the database is on a spinning drive, you won’t be able to get it to spin down. There is periodic database house keeping that happens. If it’s the data, then there are plenty of prior threads covering this topic.

3

Thanks for your prompt response, @AudriusButkevicius.

Yes, it’s probably about the database which resides on a spinning drive. Sorry to hear that there is no way to change the interval of the periodic database housekeeping or is something like that planned for future releases?

For me it would absolutely make sense if Syncthing considered the HDD state or at least allowed to postpone all these maintenance tasks.

4

It’s not something that is planned, and I don’t think it’s even possible, as the database package is out of our control.

You should move the database to the internal SD card.

5

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