Buffalo Drivestation Quad (HD-QL16TU3R5-EB) disk sleep isssue

[foobr84]

I've got issue with Drivestation Quad's drive-sleep, or rather spin up functionality.

Setup
I've connected the Drivestation to linux server, and configured the enclosure to be in JBOD mode. Thus all four drives are visible to the operating system. From two of the drives I've build RAID1, and two other drives are defined to be one physical volume group, from where I've made two logical partitions (using lvm).

Problem
Now the problem is that even when the drives are not mounted, and therefore there is absolutely no activity on the drives, they still sleep only 3 minutes before they wake up. With default settings this means that the drive heads are parked aggressively, and then woke up every couple of minutes. This is heavy for the drives as the Load_Cycle_Count for the drives increases every time.

I've solved this issue with hdparm, by setting the APM level to 198. This seems to be high enough so that the heads are not parked. Unfortunaly the drives won't go to standby either. With hdparm -y  /dev/sd[bcde] I can force the drives to go immediately to sleep, but again the drives sleep only for the max 3 minutes before something wakes them up.

So the question is, has anyone else noticed this behavior with the Drivestation Quad? Has anyone solved this issue?

I called to Buffalo support number, and only answer I got was that they have released 'eco manager' for Windows, that allows you to define some power management things for the device. Unfortunately I don't have Windows, so I have no possibility to evaluate or see the what exactly this 'eco manager' allows you to do... :(

Does anyone know if it is something that you have to have running in order for the drives to go sleep? Or is it something that you can use to modify the device's settings? I.e. if I manage to get hold of windows PC, I could plug the device temporary into it, change the settings, and plug it back to my linux machine?

All the help is highly appreciated. Thanks.

[foobr84]

*bump*

Anyone using the eco manager for windows? Is it a tool that you have to have constantly running, or is it a tool that you can just use to adjust the settings and then quit?