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Seagate open-source tool openSeaChest lets you configure your drives (github.com)

submitted 1 year ago by slaecker to c/[email protected]

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Just want to share some love about Seagate.

My new DIY NAS is idle most of the time so I want to configure it to be as power efficient as possible.

I spent a couple of evenings trying to make my new WD Red Plus drives go to standby (spindown) after 30 minutes of inactivity, without success. I read about WD not respecting hdparm commands, interpreting them differently and tried all suggestions, again without success. I even read about WD support saying they don't support Linux. Strange as most of the available consumer NAS systems are based on Linux.

I then decided to try my 2nd choice drives: Seagate Ironwolf. On the first attempt they also didn't go to standby after configuring with hdparm. Then I found this: Seagate offers an open-source suite of tools named openSeaChest, which lets you configure and test your drives in any possible way including firmware updates and ... tada, power settings. After enabling idle_c and standby_z and configuring the timers the drives now do how I configured.

I returned the WD drives. Now Seagate is my top choice for future drive purchases 🧡

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[–] slaecker 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I did quite some research when I worked with the WD Red Plus drives and also tried the -S switch, without success.

In openSeaChest I just set the number of milliseconds for each power mode and it just works. I'm happy with that.

[–] TCB13 1 points 7 months ago

You've to set BOTH things (-B and -S) with reasonable values in order for it to work.