Hi,
to prevent always switching on/off the raspberry with Volimio (and having to wait for the system starting up) I would love to keep the RPi running 24/7.
When the RPi is not playing, there is nevertheless traffic on the (USB) HD and / or the SD card. I see the LED blinking every about 10 to 20 seconds.
So there are questions bothering me:
- Is it stressing the HD / SD when running Volumio on a RPi 24/7 ?
- Which mode of Volumio operation should be entered when not playing music? Pause? Empty Queue?
- Is there a configuration hint to avoid this traffic or to switch on some cacheing?
This is not mainly an issue of energy consumption but of avoiding a much shorter lifetime of the memory devices.
Thanks & best regards,
Robert
Hi Robert,
I leave a couple of devices running 24/7, but neither of those has an attached HDD. You shouldn’t need to worry about the SD card as Volumio was designed to run with minimal writes to the card (have a search if you’re interested). I don’t have any info on the HDD though … someone else will need to advise here.
Hi,
some investigation about the annoying blinking LED brings up the following easy cause: The LED is triggered by CPU / OS activity by default. One can configure what should trigger the LED. The following trigger scenarios are possible:
none kbd-scrollock kbd-numlock kbd-capslock kbd-kanalock kbd-shiftlock kbd-altgrlock kbd-ctrllock kbd-altlock kbd-shiftllock kbd-shiftrlock kbd-ctrlllock kbd-ctrlrlock mmc0 mmc1 timer oneshot heartbeat backlight gpio cpu0 cpu1 cpu2 cpu3 default-on input rfkill0 rfkill1 panic
echo none > /sys/class/leds/led0/trigger
will turn off the led completely (if it becomes annoying like in my case…)
echo heartbeat > /sys/class/leds/led0/trigger
will cause the led to flash with the linux heartbeat pattern
echo timer > /sys/class/leds/led0/trigger
will cause the led to flash once a second
I configured the LED to “none” trigger to get rid of the annoying flashlight. 
In addition I installed the inotify-tools in order to watch the I/O on the USB attached HDD. When Volumio is “paused” on a track there is no further access to the HDD. So everything seems to be safe.
cu, Robert
Hi,
in order to spin down the external HDD after a given time of inactivity and in order to dim the RPi activity LED to zero and having this persistent over a restart there are two things to do.
-
Edit /boot/config.txt and add the following:
# Disable the ACT LED.
dtparam=act_led_trigger=none
dtparam=act_led_activelow=off
(after a Volumio Update this entry will be lost and has to be renewed)
-
Install package “hdparm”
Edit /etc/hdparm.conf
Add a block like (“MUSIK” is the label of the HDD you want to spin down, time is given in seconds as long as it is 0 <= 240 - above 240 the calculation changes to 30 mimutes * (x - 240) where “x” is the spindown_time above 240:
/dev/disk/by-label/MUSIK {
spindown_time = 180
}
After a reboot the new configuration will be active.
Of course feel free to configure only one of the above.
Best regards,
Robert