I'm struggling with my mdadm RAID 1 setup on Proxmox 9 with Debian 13. Every time I mount the drives in read-write mode, they won't spin down, but when I switch to read-only, they work perfectly. I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what's keeping my drives spun up. I've shared more details in my previous post if anyone needs to reference that.
3 Answers
Having open processes might keep the drives active too. You could check with the `lsof` command to see if there’s any ghost write process that’s preventing the disks from idling, but you mentioned that it didn’t show any open files for the RAID setup.
It's worth noting that frequently spinning drives down and back up can actually increase wear on HDDs. Drives are designed to be continuously spinning, especially in a setup where you're relying on redundancy. So while you might want your drives to spin down, keep in mind the impact on lifespan.
Totally get that. I'm not planning on having them up all the time, but I want to make sure they’re backed up without burning out the drives too fast.
You might want to try a couple of things to troubleshoot this:
1. Spin up Debian 13 in a VM outside of Proxmox and see if the drives behave the same way. If they do, then the issue might not be Proxmox.
2. Consider disabling journaling for ext4 completely. If the drives still won’t spin down in RW afterward, it could point to something in Debian 13. My suspicion leans toward this being a Proxmox issue, though, but further testing should clarify it.
I’ll definitely look into the journaling option. I’m starting to think you might be right about this being a Proxmox thing. I'll test it out more this week, and I’m also considering breaking the RAID setup to test with individual drives.
Yeah, I ran `lsof`, and it didn’t show any open files related to the RAID. It's puzzling why they stay active.