HDD never turns off while PMS is running

Plex Media Server
1

Is it expected behavior that an HDD that you’ve added to your Plex library will never turn off while Plex Media Server is running?

I figured if I turned off “Scan my library automatically” it would adhere to my Windows OS settings that say that any hard disk will be turned off after being idle for 20 minutes, but alas it didn’t do the trick, so it seems that PMS is keeping it active even without this setting.

Is this the way it is? Or are there additional settings that I could tweak that would allow an HDD to turn off while I’m not playing any file on that HDD? Or is there some way to manually mark a specific library as “offline”?

That’s my question, read on only if you care why I’m asking, here’s some context:

I used to only have two Plex libraries, one for Movies and one for TV Shows. They both pointed to the same folder on my SSD where I keep new stuff until I’ve watched it. Once I have I either delete it or move it to long-term storage on one of my two HDDs. On the rare occasion that I decided to watch something in long-term storage I would just temporarily add the specific sub-folder containing the thing I want to watch to one of my two libraries. Now I decided to change that and make better use of Plex by organizing my archive and make it all neatly presentable in Plex. So I’ve added two new libraries for archived Movies and archived TV Shows respectively and created some nice Collections for various media franchises and so on. However I like having Plex running at all times while my PC is on with a tab open in Chrome. But I don’t like that my HDDs are now always active because I added them to these two new archive libraries. So they never turn off for being idle anymore. Very unnecessary for them to always be on as I won’t be using these archive libraries more than occasionally. I would not mind there being some “lag” the first time I try to fire something up in one of these libraries for a while due to the HDD having been turned off for being idle. That’s what I expected. Didn’t expect the HDDs to always be active.

2

Your drives should not always be active. There must be something else going on. Please provide your PMS logs for the time when you think your drives should be sleeping. Let me know which drive(s).

3

Thanks for your reply. Good to know it isn’t supposed to be always active. It turns out my issue is unrelated to PMS so we can go ahead an close this.

I did some more testing before I was going to prepare logs. I did what I had done earlier and exited PMS then waited the right amount of time expecting to see the HDDs turn off. They didn’t so the cause is definitely something else. Earlier this same test had caused the HDDs to turn off so I jumped to conclusions, but it seems it was only a coincidence.

4

Don’t try so hard to make your HDDs spin down.
The number of spin up/down cycles is an important number to assess the lifetime of a HDD. In other words: if you do it several times a day, your hard drive will die much sooner than you expect.
I’d concentrate on dampening the noise which emanates from the drive.

5

@OttoKerner Pro tip, appreciated.

6

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