DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

Why power it down? It suppose to spin down the HD, and the box itself use a few power. As long as box spin down the HD correctly, I don't think keep it running 24/7 is a problem.

Power where I live is not particularly stable, on the average we see outages several times a week and sometimes several times a day - the length of the outage varies, most are around 5~10 minutes, occasionally they will last for several hours.

All computer equipment in my home office (except for the printers) are UPS protected, and the servers will automatically shutdown under UPS control, and start back up when power is restored.  One of the servers shuts down the DNS-323 using a script - but - since I have not found a way to switch the unit on when power is restored, it stays off until the next time I need it.

Depending on exactly what is happening at the time the power goes off you run the risk of losing part or all of the stored data.

mealto

There is NO other way - you may not have the type of power that I do, but if you have an outage when you are writing to the unit, there is a better than 50% chance you're going to lose data - so now - you have to weigh the probability of an outage whilst you're writing to it.

For me the probability is quite high, so I have a UPS.

If your concern is the device losing power when left unattended, I think you're probably safe - if it's in sleep mode when the power goes out, chances of data loss are significantly lower.

Grimham wrote:

My 323 stays off 75% of the time.  I only  turn it on if I need files stored on it or to stream movies.  It's funny you say yours takes 5-10 mins to boot.  Mine takes (hold on, I'm gonna time this)............44 seconds from the time I hit the power button to the time the light stops blinking and I can access the unit.  Running  2 Samsung 400gigs in RIAD 1.  Do you have some fun plugs or something that increase the boot time that much?

No plug ins here at all. Just running firmware 1.04. Boot up is pretty quick, about 30 secs but after that, both harddrive lights blink and I can hear the harddrive spin and work out for about 5-8 minutes. So you are saying this is not normal? What could be causing this?

I leave my unit on 24/7 cept for the occasional reboots (which does not power down the unit)... My main concern is not so much the power consumption of the unit but rather the lifespan of the harddisk...

Do remember that if you're using (and most likely you are) consumer grade desktop harddisks, they are meant to be used on average for 8 hours a day... I have a Seagate 500gb (consumer grade) installed on my 323 but i'm seriously considering replacing it with the enterprise version... These are rated for 24/7 use and still carry the standard 5 year warranty... All other specs remain the same cept for the beforementioned durability... Of course, the cost of the enterprise version is higher but only marginally...

fordem wrote:

mihar

There's a report somewhere on the net that was generated from statistics gathered by Google on the disk failures they experienced, I'll try to find it and post the link, but if I recall correctly, it completely blows away many of the accepted norms on hard disk drive life, MTBF, effects of temperature, etc.

The durability that you mention is most likely MTBF - mean time between failures - which is a manufacturer's projection and not an actual indicator of drive life.

This one? http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

That was not the report I saw, but it does appear to have been the source of the data for what may have been an article - so to all intents & purposes, I will say - yes - that one.

HaydnH wrote:

mealto wrote:

...both harddrive lights blink and I can hear the harddrive spin and work out for about 5-8 minutes. So you are saying this is not normal? What could be causing this?

Do you have a media server installed or use the default media server? It may be looking for media files etc...

The unit is new and I did not even have a chance to setup media servers yet. But after your comment, I went in to check and both UPnP & iTunes servers were enabled. I have disabled them so let's see what happens on the next reboot. By the way,

1. If you run I do have iTunes on various computers on the network, will the itunes servre copy music files to the 323? Is this what the itunes server is for?

2. Is the UPnP server for streaming? Is this so that other computers can stream media from other machines on the network without having to download the entire video first?

Thanks!

Thanks for the reply HaydnH. I used neither but by default, both were enabled! That was causing the 323's boot up time to increase as there was about 5 minutes of activity after the normal boot up sequence. Went and disabled both of them.

mealto wrote:

Thanks for the reply HaydnH. I used neither but by default, both were enabled! That was causing the 323's boot up time to increase as there was about 5 minutes of activity after the normal boot up sequence. Went and disabled both of them.

I believe the longer boot time when the iTunes and UPnP option is turned on is due to the DNS refreshing the file list on the disk... Quite normal actually... But since you power down the device quite often, it can be annoying to wait when starting it again...

@leftkidney - how about you open a new thread, post the details there and let's see if someone can help you figure it out.

We'll need some details, what firmware, fun_plug, any other hacks, etc.

as of now I have no hacks done

stock firmware

I want to hack it but havent got around to soldering the RS-232 port on

I really am waiting for a firmware type of hack like the WRT54G routers have, all you got to do is update the firmware and then it is hacked, whats the problem with this?