My book live never sleeps

ravelord wrote:

“Although not the entire time, sometimes it sleeps just fine. Other times (mostly during the night) it wakes up every 60 seconds after sleep.”

Exactly the same behaviour I have noticing. Maybe I should try the pinhole reset though I have 1.5 TB on the NAS and no place to backup :slight_smile:

Afaik, the data won’t be erased. But I can’t guarantee anything.

After much testing, I I found that my Directv DVR boxes are not allowing the My Book Live to sleep.  Any ideas on how to get around this issue besides unplugging the network cable or turning off media sharing on the DVR?

so you verified that the MBL went to sleep if it had media sharing enabled, but the DVR was no connected? 

Some people are finding that even if you have no dnla destinations hooked up, just having media sharing enabled on the MBL will not let it sleep.

Myron is also finding that if you never log off your computer, the quickview status checks may fill up the drive log cache and start writing to disk, preventing sleeping.

Yes, if the DVR is disconnected and media sharing is enabled on the MBL it goes to sleep. As soon as I plug in the DVR the MBL turns green and flashes every 5-10 seconds. I have all kinds of other devices hooked up to it, but the DVR is the only one that wakes it up.

I also have this problem.  Sometimes sleeps for a long time, sometimes wakes up 60 seconds after sleeping.  How can we tell what wakes up the device?

My MBL never sleeps; it has the 2.10 firmware.

Actually, the MBL never stops doing something as the green led is blinking all the time; only time it does is when I unplugged it from the router or just unplugged the power adapter.  Interesting that others report that the led is out or never go to blue for standby (sleep?).

Waiting for the WD to send RMA replacement as cannot access Dashboard; infact, I cannot even access WD QuickView now as the icon just shows the “about” selection.

Have stopped ripping my CDs to the drive; at least I can still listen to music.

Hi Tony

Did this fix ever make it into production?

Thanks

Andy

Hi Tony (and all friends),

As I use this box only as storage (NFS&Samba) I killed the twonky and the other niceties off, but the standby mode still doesn’t kick in. Taking a look at the system, I found this:

/usr/bin/monitorio.sh is monitoring the I/O by checking /proc/diskstats every minute

! By calling a lot of tools from /bin and /usr/bin ! As soon as the content of these executables is dropped from the fs cache, the disks will spin up to fetch them again, so the sleep time will be the fs cache retention time rounded up to the next minute.

IMHO the best way would be simpler to let the drives handle the standby themselves: hdparm -S 120 /dev/sd[ab]

Sure, for the flashy led show you would need some program that, once loaded, can perform file operations on the /proc/… entries without touching anything, but since you have /usr/bin/php, I don’t think that’s a problem.

Or, shadow the whole /bin, /lib, /usr/bin, /usr/lib to ramdisk. Or, put the whole branch to the initrd image and run it from there.

The same is true for /etc/rc.logrotate: shell script, invokes external binaries.

For some reason, syslogd also wakes up the drives, regardless of the ‘-m 0’.

The smbd and nmbd also keep some file open, and although they don’t write them, a ‘stat’ is still considered as IO: /usr/var/locks.hd/*.tdb, /DataVolume/jewab/log.smbd, /usr/private/secrets.tdb, /usr/var/log/log.nmbd.

I haven’t checked the /proto/SxM_webui/* files, but they seem to behave nicely, not waking up the disks.

As a conclusion: your firmware, as it is now, heavily relies on a writeable storage, and therefore the standby mode requires heavy refactoring. If you allow me some advice (on the base of several flash-based embedded systems):

  • Run from the initrd. If you don’t intend to write the binaries, why switching to an r/w storage?

  • Unless doing config changes, keep everything r/o. When changing a config: remount rw, change, remount ro.

  • If something needs transient state data (like logs), send them to ramdisk that you rotate frequently.

  • Don’t enable the standby mode that you didn’t test, the frequent spinning up/down heats up the disks more than the constant operation.

Regards,

Mozsafa

1 Like

Hello,

I stubbled on this thread and wanted to give my experiences. I don’t have the exact problem of my MBL not going into sleep mode, but my experiences may help solve some of those problems. I have 3 MBL’s all sitting together so I can see their status.

I noticed that one of my units always was being “Accessed”…the other 2 were in sleep mode and would wake up as I would expect them to when being accessed.

I called WD support about this and pretty much got a “Party Line” response even when I told them that if I disconneted the network cable the drive’s light  continued to blink and I could hear the drive being constantly being accessed.

During this process which lasted several months, I got multiple Over Heating Alerts from this drive. My other 2 drives, sitting next to this one, never overheated.

Finally, I got WD to replace the unit…the new one did the same exact thing once I got it set up and put data on itnd updated the Firmware to MyBookLive 02.10.12-129 : Core F/W.

I contacted WD again to try and determine what was happening, again without success. Then I found this thread and tried some of the things mentioned. I was able to find what the problem was.

Here is what I found:

    I have about 120K of pictures backed up on this drive (none of the other drives have pictures on  them).
    Remote Access was Turned ON
    TWONKY was turned ON
    Firmware: MyBookLive 02.10.12-129 : Core F/W

    Turned OFF Remote Access …Drive Still being accessed. I rebooted the drive…Still Being Accessed

    Turned OFF TWONKY - Device NO Longer being Accessed (after about 5 minutes) and went into Sleep Mode
    after about 10 minutes

    Turned ON Remote Access - Device began being accessed again.

    Turned OFF Remote Access - Device NO Longer being Accessed (after about 5 minutes) and went into Sleep
    Mode after  about 10 minutes

    Turned ON TWONKY  (Remote Access was Turned OFF ) - Device began being accessed again.

    Turned OFF TWONKY - Device NO Longer being Accessed (after about 5 minutes) and went into Sleep Mode
    after about 10 minutes

So, in my case, either TWONKY or Remote Access being on, coupled with a large amount of pictures on the MBL, caused my drive to be constantly accessed and naturally not go into Sleep Mode. I had to be patient, since there is definitely some delay between turning off TWONKY and Remote Access and the drive activity stopping and going into Sleep Mode.

I have not loaded any music or Videos on any of the other drives yet, so I don’t know if the MBL would behave the same way with those, or not…

In any event, I now have a lot of pictures on a drive that I can’t get to (easily) with other DLNA devices…which is why I bought the MBL in the first place.

A quick note to the gentleman from WD (WDTony) who has been helping out on this thread…I hope WD realizes this is a huge problem…If they sell 3TB drives to be hooked to the network, you would have to expect large amounts of media (pictures included/especially) to reside on them. The constant accessing of the drive to transcode pictures, causing very slow access and the overheating during that time, has to be addressed.

One thing I didn’t mention was that the activity on this drive went for about 4 weeks after I loaded the pictures (at that time I didn’t realize that it was the pictures causing the problem). Shortly after the Activity light stopped blinking, I put about 1000 more pictures on the drive…Accessing of the drive went on for another 3-4 weeks. This tells me that everytime pictures are added, everything is re-transcoded…or at least that’s the way it appears.

So? Any news on this?

I have noticed the performance of my drive jump off a cliff whenever the mediacrawler its transcoding pictures. I hate to turn of remote access just to elimate the transcoding process. I could care less about encoding pictures for moibile viewing, isnt there a way to kill this process other than turning of remote access? Im confident this isnt Twonky indexing my library, I have watched Twonky index my 2.2TB collection in about 10 minutes, which i can deal with. 

I have only had this 3TB drive for about 5 days, every time I check it the green light is flashing and I can hear the drive accesing. And when I access it its slow because of the dang transcoding. 

If you have a large iTunes library there is a folder that probably contains album artwork, this is most likely the cause for the transcoding. How can we kill this proces? Is there a way to SSH in and prevent the transcoding from happening?  Im sure this would help many with the sleeping drive issues (again, orther than turning off remote access).

After I noticed my book live was not sleeping at all after the most recent firmware update 02.10.12-129 it just won’t sleep even after disabling Twonky Media, Itunes server and Remote Access along with NTP time server and it still does not sleep and I even made sure nothing was accessing it and it just sits there idling and every 20 seconds or so I hear the read/write sound, It still does it after unplugging it from LAN so i dont know what to do.

Is there any log we can post here to detect the cause of this issue?

At night I only have the router going and the 3tb MBL  (Nothing else is turned on) and every morning at 5 am I could hear the MBL drive spin up again

even before I had signed up to access it from the internet

I dont use twonky

I only use it as a NAS for program files

I dont  stream multimedia from it

it has up to date firmware in it

I dont want it cataloging  the multi media files on the drive - they are just for storage

WDTony wrote:

Correct, we have seen that it is a process that is waking up the mediacrawler. We are reviewing this and should be working on a fix for this soon.

I was able to temporarirly fix my sleep issue by just leaving twonky media turned on and remote access and iTunes Server off and I was able to get it to sleep, But after I put some movies on the Public share it no longer sleeps with Twonky Media Enabled or disabled.

I changed the media serving to Videos seeing as that is the only thing on the Public share and I also turned Twonky Media back on will see if it sleeps.

Well still does not sleep even after turning media serving to none on all shares and even after turning off twonky media.

It only started doing this when I put movies on the public share.

Had my 2TB MBL for 3+ weeks and it only went to sleep mode (blue LED) once. Have video, music and backup files on the public share. Twonky & iTunes turned off. But the green LED is NOT flashing, just steady.

whsbuss wrote:

Had my 2TB MBL for 3+ weeks and it only went to sleep mode (blue LED) once. Have video, music and backup files on the public share. Twonky & iTunes turned off. But the green LED is NOT flashing, just steady.

 

Update: if I unmount the Public share from my mac, it finally sleeps. Never thought of that.

Sleep problem seems to be resolved after recent firmware update.

Not so sure about that. I did the update yesterday and today I’ve noticed the MBL not going into sleep mode. Has steady green LED.