Recording to sleeping NAS

[Teddles]

Early morning scheduled recording ended up in the Wiz default location (/media/hdd/movie) instead of the specified directory on my networked Synology NAS. I suspect that the NAS was too tardy in waking from standby. Does this assumption seem plausible and if so, any suggestions on how to circumvent this in the future.

Thanks

[MrQuade]

I'm afraid the answer is to not allow your NAS to sleep.

The Wiz will perform a check to ensure the recording location is available, and if it doesn't respond in a short time, then it will revert to the default location.

It's generally a bad idea to record to a location that is not always available.

[Grumpy_Geoff]

Not only plausible, but accurate.
When I need to record to a potentially "sleeping" share, I work around it - viewtopic.php?f=66&t=13638&p=182063#p182063

[Teddles]

I have the NAS configured to go into hibernation after a period of inactivity so clearly this is the issue.
I'm not comfortable having the NAS fully powered up 24/7 so I'll maintain the status quo for the time being and just head over to the Wiz default recording directory when/if this happens again. If it becomes frequent (and burdensome) I'll disable NAS hibernation.

Thanks all for your input.

[IanB]

A work around is to schedule a 1 minute recording to the NAS a few minutes before the real recording.

This will poke the NAS and have it wake up, so when the real recording starts the NAS is ready.

This assumes the NAS will wake on a normal network request. NAS's in full hibernation will need a wake on lan event to trigger them. I thought I saw a plugin to do this, but cannot find it now.

[peteru]

I have the NAS configured to go into hibernation after a period of inactivity so clearly this is the issue.

This is an ill-advised practice that will reduce the lifespan of your HDDs and increase the likelihood of catastrophic failure without warning. A proper NAS server should use enterprise grade HDDs that keep constantly spinning for years on end. I have a NAS server I built with a HDD that has been operating for 9.5 years and has 15 power cycles.

Datacenters have scheduled system powerdowns or HDD spindowns once every 1-3 years to "knock out" marginal drives. When I worked on enterprise monitoring projects, we typically saw around 20-30 drives out of a thousand that had no issues while running but would start exhibiting problems after a spindown / power cycle. HDDs hate power and thermal cycling more than anything else - just let them run.

[Teddles]

I have the NAS configured to go into hibernation after a period of inactivity so clearly this is the issue.

This is an ill-advised practice that will reduce the lifespan of your HDDs and increase the likelihood of catastrophic failure without warning.

Advice heeded, hibernation has been disabled.

[Barboots]

HDDs hate power and thermal cycling more than anything else - just let them run.

Would this apply to a lesser degree in the context of a domestic NAS compared to a data centre? I considered that my long-term idle NAS would have cooled down considerably through lack of disk activity and processing. I certainly haven't studied it, but at a quick glance I thought that the monitoring app concurred.

I made my choice based on the environmental cost of 4 drives running 24/7. However despite using RAID with error recovery, I've heard enough stories of additional disk failures through the rebuilding process to be uncomfortable with tempting fate.

I'm very interested in your experience Peter. You're really confident that in an extremely low duty-cycle environment it's better to leave the drives spinning?

Cheers, Steve

[MrQuade]

I considered that my long-term idle NAS would have cooled down considerably through lack of disk activity and processing.

The fact that it is cooling is a good half of the problem. All your disk's materials are going to be expanding and contracting reach time you cycle the power, and it all contributes to long term physical wear.

The environmental and monetary cost of running a typical home NAS is negligible.

[Barboots]

I considered that my long-term idle NAS would have cooled down considerably through lack of disk activity and processing.

The fact that it is cooling is a good half of the problem.

So I should have it set to back up PronHub to keep it busy?

OK... I'll disable spin-down.

Cheers, Steve