This includes creating or editing any share or task, snapshot, replication, rsync, etc., on that volume. Anything you do to access the volume, even indirectly, will spin it up.But beware of the following (yup, two more caveats): This means SMART won't check the drive (and spin it up), if it is in Standby mode (spun down). Click OK and do the same for all drives in the volume. Set Advanced Power Management to 127 (I'm not sure this is needed as - says APM is off on my drives).

'HDD Standby' is the standby timer: number of minutes the disk is idle before it should go into standby. Click on the first of the disks in the volume and click the Edit button at the bottom. Note the names (ignore the p2 on the end). Under the raid configuration the drives are listed. Then click the Volume Status icon at the bottom.

If you need to find out which disks are in the volume you want to spin down, go to Storage > Volumes and click on the volume.

If you still want to do it, here are the steps: In my case, I have my main volume on the disks on the card, spinning 24/7, and a backup volume on disks on the motherboard, spinning up once a day to receive replication tasks. The GUI lets you make settings on disks attached through the card, but they have no effect. So I can control disks attached to the motherboard SATA ports, but not to the card. I read somewhere that the FreeBSD developers decided that supporting that functionality is not going to happen.

Another caveat is that you can't do this power management stuff through an add-on card, at least not the one I have, LSI 9240-8i flashed to IT mode.

I have not tested whether this is true when the person logging in has no access privileges to that share. FreeNAS, in its wisdom, spins up all disks in volumes that have shares, even if you are going for a share on another volume.

This will be a dealbreaker for some people: If there are shares on the volume you put in standby, it will spin up any time someone logs into the server, even if they are going into a different volume (does not apply to SSH).

USB flash drives are not recommended as the constant writing is hard on them. I have a SSD in a USB enclosure left over from upgrading the drive in a laptop and it works fine plugged into a USB port. Ideally you would put that in a special volume on a solid state drive (SSD) or a SataDOM. You can set it to another volume in System > System Dataset (also check Syslog and Reporting Database).

The system dataset gets written to constantly. By default, this is the first volume you created. The first thing to know is that you can't spin down a volume that the system dataset is on.But some of us may want to have drives spin up once a day (or less) for a task and then spin down. Note that many of the experts here will tell you that drives last longer if they just keep spinning rather than stopping and starting, and even that less energy and resources are consumed by letting them spin than starting and stopping them and having to manufacture and ship replacement drives. Still, the developers left open the possibility. As cyberjock has said, FreeNAS is not really designed for this, so it's like fitting a round peg in a square hole. I'm no expert, but I was able to do it finally and understand most of what is going on. Many of us want to have drives in one or more pools/volumes go into standby (i.e., stop spinning).

Keep drive spinning sierra