Still, this is an open topic since 2013. But my DS116 with latest DSM Beta (7.0-41222) and PMS (1.22.3.4523) still refuses to sleep since I installed PMS. Not even the HDD goes to power-off. As far as I understand, there is some set of hacks from 2013 to 2017 that can be applied, mainly hindering PMS in
From official side (if I got it right), the message is that energy saving is simply not considered in PMS. In 2021, which is eight years after 2013 when the first hacks were proposed, I cannot understand that these hacks were not reflected by user-definable options. Please guys, climate change is real! No need to waste electric energy…
With my limited knowledge, I see no design reason why a media server should not “sleep”, i.e. do HDD (or even system) hibernation and delay media scanning, update checks and the resulting log writing for a few hours, allowing at least the discs to sleep. As soon as there is user activity (adding media, listening to music), the disks would wake up again anyways and those activities can take place.
System hibernate might be more complex as Wake-on-LAN would need to be working properly also upon app access, but at least disk hibernation should be nothing I need to apply a hack for. Personally, I would be happy with update or library checks once a day! And without user activity, logging should not occur if the PMS is not doing these checks anymore.
Please, give a comment if you are aware of a recent solution. Also a proper 2021 developer statement would be greatly appreciated.
Same problem with my Asustor 604t.
I cannot get hibernation to work when Plex is enabled on the Nas.
Disable it and within 5 minutes all hdds are hibernating.
What is plex doing that is more important than preserving the life of my hardware that it refuses my nas to work as intended by allowing my hard drives to hibernate and for me to save power!
Please fix this as this seems like this issue is almost a DECADE old!
@Volts: True. Plex does several things. It does these things since ten years. But this is no reason it needs to be this way.
For sure, I am not an expert. But in my naive view it would be enough to do most of these periodic tasks once or twice per day AND during user activities (say, listening to music) that wake up the disks anyways.
I assume that PMS was not designed for enery saving in the early 2000’s, and as there is no pressure as long as people pay, no one cares.
My impression is that using a SSD is a workaround, but no solution that adresses the root of the issue. But thanks for the proposal, I keep in in mind if the developers will not comment here.
Thanks to @trumpy81 for the detailed feedback. I would like to comment some points:
Regarding images and other media data (metadata, lyrics, themes) that needs to be retrieved (let’s call it service tasks): I fully agree that this needs to be done. But me (and I assume thousands of others) add some media here and there, but not on an hourly base. This brings me back to my root concern: These tasks can be done when people (me, friends) are using PMS and adding or receiving media. No need to do this every 30 minutes. Why not do the job after adding media and then on a daily base?
Regarding logs: Yes. Indeed, logs are needed. But when the PMS learns to relax and do nothing when there’s no user activity, there’s nothing to log. If there’s disc-less activity, the corresponding log entries can be kept in memory until the next media access.
Regarding Synology and the NAS itself: I use a very fresh install. Only base apps and PMS. When I stop PMS, the system goes to disc hibernate first and then even to system hibernate within 30 minutes. No issues without PMS running. So the root cause is PMS.
Having PMS running, I tried to set the disc hibernate delay to 10 mins, and then indeed, the system hibernates for 20 mins before PMS is waking up everything again. This is repeated every hour, probably matching the predefined task schedulers of PMS. Note, I switched off all verbose logging and everything that sounds like frequent activities in the PMS settings. Even DLNA is off. On the long run, spinning the discs up and down in a 30 minute cycle will kill the disc drives and probably need more energy then letting them run all the time
If the Plex engineers meanwhile allow the system to sleep in principle (which I can basically confirm), why is there no set of options to also allow larger delays between these periodic service tasks? I would be optimistic that this would be easy to implement, if there’s a will…
