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<h1 id="limiting-drive-spinup">Limiting drive spinup</h1>
<h2 id="how-can-i-setup-my-system-to-limit-drive-spinup">How can I setup my system to limit drive spinup?</h2>
<p>TL;DR: You really can't. Not through mergerfs alone. In fact mergerfs
makes an attempt to do so more complicated.</p>
<p>mergerfs is a proxy. Despite having some caching behaviors it is not
designed to cache much more than metadata. It proxies calls between
client software and underlying filesystems. If a client makes a
request such as <code>open</code>, <code>readdir</code>, <code>stat</code>, etc. it must translate that
into something that makes sense across multiple filesystems. For
<code>readdir</code> that means running the call against all branches and
aggregating the output. For <code>open</code> that means finding the file to open
and doing so. The only way to find the file to open is to scan across
all branches and sort the results and pick one. There is no practical
way to do otherwise. Especially given so many mergerfs users expect
out-of-band changes to "just work."</p>
<p>The best way to limit spinup of drives is to limit their usage at the
client level. Meaning keeping software from interacting with the
filesystem (and therefore the drive) all together.</p>
<h3 id="what-if-you-assume-no-out-of-band-changes-and-cache-everything">What if you assume no out-of-band changes and cache everything?</h3>
<p>This would require a significant rewrite of mergerfs. Everything is
done on the fly right now and all those calls to underlying
filesystems can cause a spinup. To work around that a database of some
sort would have to be used to store ALL metadata about the underlying
filesystems and on startup everything scanned and stored. From then on
it would have to carefully update all the same data the filesystems
do. It couldn't be kept in RAM because it would take up too much space
so it'd have to be on a SSD or other storage device. If anything
changed out of band it would break things in weird ways. It could
rescan on occasion but that would require spinning up
everything. Filesystem watches could be used to get updates when the
filesystem changes but that would allow for race conditions and
might keep the drives from spinning down. Something as "simple" as
keeping the current available free space on each filesystem isn't as
easy as one might think given reflinks, snapshots, and other block
level dedup technologies as well as the space used includes not just
raw file usage.</p>
<p>Even if all metadata (including xattrs) is cached some software will
open files (media like videos and audio) to check their
metadata. Granted a Plex or Jellyfin scan which may do that is
different from a random directory listing but is still something to
consider. Those "deep" scans can't be kept from waking drives.</p>
<h3 id="what-if-you-only-query-already-active-drives">What if you only query already active drives?</h3>
<p>Let's assume that is plausible (it isn't because some drives actually
will spin up if you ask if they are spun down... yes... really) you
would have to either cache all the metadata on the filesystem or treat
it like the filesystem doesn't exist. The former has all the problems
mentioned prior and the latter would break a lot of things.</p>
<h3 id="is-there-anything-that-can-be-done-where-mergerfs-is-involved">Is there anything that can be done where mergerfs is involved?</h3>
<p>Yes, but whether it works for you depends on your tolerance for the
complexity.</p>
<ol>
<li>Cleanly separate writing, storing, and consuming the data.</li>
<li>Use a SSD or dedicated and limited pool of drives for downloads / torrents.</li>
<li>When downloaded move the files to the primary storage pool.</li>
<li>When setting up software like Plex, Jellyfin, etc. point to the
      underlying filesystems. Not mergerfs.</li>
<li>Add a bunch of bcache, lvmcache, dm-cache, or similar block level
   cache to your setup. After a bit of use, assuming sufficient
   storage space, you can limit the likelihood of the underlying
   spinning disks from needing to be hit.</li>
</ol>
<p>Remember too that while it may be a tradeoff you are willing to live
with there is decent evidence that spinning down drives puts increased
wear on them and can lead to their death earlier than otherwise.</p>


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