Thecus N2100 spindown - irrespective of Twonky's scan setup

[bluearcus]

Hi there,

I'm trialling TwonkyMedia 4.4 on my Thecus n2100 NAS (128Mb memory, mirrored pair of WD 500Gb disks, near latest firmware - v2.01.09).

Overall the product seems excellent in terms of performance.

However, there's one issue, which is that I can't get the disks to spindown consistantly. When Twonky is running, there are intermittant reads or writes going on to the disks, whatever the scan interval configuration is (or even if scanning is disabled or set to auto-checking).

This is pretty much a deal breaker for me. With scanning switched off, Twonky still has the disks spinning for around 12 our of every 24 hours, and with scanning on an hourly basis, the disks are on for 70% of the time. This results in NAS temperatures of 40-45 degrees.

With Twonky disabled, the NAS spins down reliably when not accessed, and system temperatures are in the mid to low 35s.

Any help on diagnosing or fixing the problem would be greatly appreciated. At the moment, I won't be buying TwonkyMedia unless I can get this sorted.

Regards,

Mike

[Briain]

Hi

I've done a fair quantity of work looking to ensure my Netgear NAS hibernates correctly. At no point have I had any issue with TwonkyMedia server (see next sentence) but I have had problems with SqueezeCentre (see bug report here: http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9102 ).

I use both SqueezeCentre (for a Logitech Duet) and Twonky (for a Linn DS system). The Linn system uses an ultra-mobile laptop (Samsung Q1) with Linn's GUI installed. With the GUI active, the hibernation does not function correctly but when the GUI is closed, I've had the NAS hibernate for 80 hours plus; this isn't a problem for me since I only use the Linn GUI when streaming music from the NAS to the DS. When not in use, the Logitech controller is meant to sit in its charge cradle and display a rather nice clock. As soon as the Logitech Controller is switched off, the hibernation interruptions cease (I'm hoping Logitech can address this as it would be nice to leave it switched on and with the clock showing).

If you haven’t done so already, I would suggest that you try the NAS with all control elements switched off (not just in standby mode). It could be that the control point is trying to refresh the playlist, or some other activity which is causing a memory leak in the NAS (I suspect that Logitech Controller hourly time updates are what wakes mine; see bug report for full details).

To summaries, with the Logitech Receiver switched on, the Linn DS player switched on, my main office PC switched on (with drives mapped to the NAS, but not being accessed), the NAS hibernates perfectly. With control point elements switched on, the hibernation is interrupted. Hopefully you can resolve this by simply switching off the control element when you are not actually streaming anything from the NAS. I hope this helps and I'd be interested to hear how you get on.

Kindest regards,
Briain (radio@btinternet.com)

[Briain]

Footnote to the above: I tried an unofficial beta Twonky 5 for the Netgear NAS (someone has kindly posted on the Netgear site) and the hibernation failed. I've removed it to see if that's what caused the problem and will post an update when I know the answer.
Bri