WHS is designed to be allways available, so for that reason it should run all the time.

Sorry man, but from what I've read, thats been one of the main design elements from the start.

---

You don't really want to put a server in standby :(.

I think it's a missed opportunity, with today's trend towards powersaving. That's the principal reason for me not to go WHS.

You can go into the power options and allow the HD's to spin down after a time interval. But I also don't know why you would want to put a server into Standby.

Bubble:

I think it's a missed opportunity, with today's trend towards powersaving. That's the principal reason for me not to go WHS.

Seriously, what part of "a file server in sleep mode may as well be turned off" do you not get? If your CPU throttles down, your hard drives spin down, there's no video taking power, and there's not even a lot of RAM, how much electricity do you think this thing is really consuming? Is it _really_ worth it for a sleep mode?

No one's file servers go to S3 sleep. It's completely non-sensical for what they're designed to do.

Well, in my case, i would like to put WHS into standby...  the reasons behind it do not matter. period.

Unfortunately, i don't live in the States where electricity is cheap  ( compared to us Aussies ).

My server has 13 HDD's, running an Athlon64 3200, and the first quater i had it running, my electricity bill shot up by $300 !!!   The WAF went straight down.

I want to stick with WHS purely for the folder duplication feature and drive spanning.  Thats it !!

If i could achieve this with XP i would do it.

I have worked out, that WHS wakes up every 30 minutes. However, if i place into standby 15 minutes after it woke up last, it will sleep for only 15 minutes. If i put it back into standby straight away, it will sleep for 30 minutes.

There is a service or task, which runs every 30 minutes on the dot !!  If i can work which service it is, i would try to disable it and see what happens.

But for some reason, people are more interested in telling me that " It's not designed for..  blah blah blah.. " or " Why would you want to place it into standby..... " and so on..

There are plenty of people who share my needs, and it would be nice if we could all work together to try and solve this, instead of argueing and debating about it.

cheers

I have my WHS only run between the hours of 2am and 6am. This is because at the moment I only want to use it backup my three PCs. I have a NAS for shared access music and video files. Whilst WHS is a beta this is how it will be ... I am using an old Shuttle and I cannot get enough storage in it to function as anything else. Even when I do have a dedicated WHS (which I will) I will probably have it shut down whilst I am at work (8am-7pm) unless it has *really* low power requirements and is very quiet. I won't be there to use it and have no plan to use the remote access functionality so there is no point it being on.

So the original question is not as dumb as some are relishing making out.

The way I have done this is to have a scheduled task on my Media Centre (which is on 24-7) to invoke a Wake On Lan utility at 1:50am and a scheduled task on the WHS to shutdown (using the DOS "shutdown" command) at 6am. The backups are set to only work during these hours. Works like a dream.

Hi vvulture,

I'm totally with you on this one and tearing my hair out trying to fix this!! I've even written a quick tool in .Net to report when the server goes up & down and it's exactly every 30 minutes (+/- 60 secs) as you suggest. You can see the output below....

13/08/2007 21:19:50 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 21:24:32 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 4 minutes + 42 seconds
13/08/2007 21:50:03 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 21:55:15 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 5 minutes + 12 seconds
13/08/2007 22:20:17 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 22:27:44 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 7 minutes + 27 seconds
13/08/2007 22:50:31 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 22:55:13 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 4 minutes + 42 seconds

I too tried removing the network cable and making sure only Magic Packets can wake the server but it still insists on coming alive every 30 minutes. It must a Win Server 2003 or WHS specific task as my Vista MCE machine sleeps just fine...

As you'll see from the alert raised, the 30 minute waking triggers the .Net PowerBroadcastStatus.ResumeAutomatic event, the MSDN description is just this: "The computer has woken up automatically to handle an event.". From here I've got no clue how to dive deeper other than trying to run perfmon to track utilisation and see which processes are most active although that could lead to more red herrings???

Does anyone else have a better suggestion as I too want to keep the Server in sleep mode except for when being accessed and overnight backup etc?

erwos:

Bubble:

I think it's a missed opportunity, with today's trend towards powersaving. That's the principal reason for me not to go WHS.

Seriously, what part of "a file server in sleep mode may as well be turned off" do you not get? If your CPU throttles down, your hard drives spin down, there's no video taking power, and there's not even a lot of RAM, how much electricity do you think this thing is really consuming? Is it _really_ worth it for a sleep mode?

No one's file servers go to S3 sleep. It's completely non-sensical for what they're designed to do.

+1.
I think the non-computer geeks are coming out of the light with this silliness :D.

MitchSchaft:

erwos:

Bubble:

I think it's a missed opportunity, with today's trend towards powersaving. That's the principal reason for me not to go WHS.

Seriously, what part of "a file server in sleep mode may as well be turned off" do you not get? If your CPU throttles down, your hard drives spin down, there's no video taking power, and there's not even a lot of RAM, how much electricity do you think this thing is really consuming? Is it _really_ worth it for a sleep mode?

No one's file servers go to S3 sleep. It's completely non-sensical for what they're designed to do.

+1.
I think the non-computer geeks are coming out of the light with this silliness :D.

 

It has nothing to do with non-computer geeks erwos..

Bottom line is, that as server is only meant to stay on 24/7 because it has been deemed that way for so long now...

But times are changing, and so is the humble server...

silstream:

Hi vvulture,

I'm totally with you on this one and tearing my hair out trying to fix this!! I've even written a quick tool in .Net to report when the server goes up & down and it's exactly every 30 minutes (+/- 60 secs) as you suggest. You can see the output below....

13/08/2007 21:19:50 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 21:24:32 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 4 minutes + 42 seconds
13/08/2007 21:50:03 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 21:55:15 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 5 minutes + 12 seconds
13/08/2007 22:20:17 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 22:27:44 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 7 minutes + 27 seconds
13/08/2007 22:50:31 - System Up (Automatic Resume to Handle Event)
13/08/2007 22:55:13 - System Down (Suspended) - Been Up 0 days, 0 hours, 4 minutes + 42 seconds

I too tried removing the network cable and making sure only Magic Packets can wake the server but it still insists on coming alive every 30 minutes. It must a Win Server 2003 or WHS specific task as my Vista MCE machine sleeps just fine...

As you'll see from the alert raised, the 30 minute waking triggers the .Net PowerBroadcastStatus.ResumeAutomatic event, the MSDN description is just this: "The computer has woken up automatically to handle an event.". From here I've got no clue how to dive deeper other than trying to run perfmon to track utilisation and see which processes are most active although that could lead to more red herrings???

Does anyone else have a better suggestion as I too want to keep the Server in sleep mode except for when being accessed and overnight backup etc?

Thanks for the effort silstream...

i am no closer to solving this either...

Funny thing is, that it even does it in Hibernate mode..  Strange since the system is in effect powered down..

 

I meassured it myself and idle uses more than 10 times as much, so I'd say there's a big difference. Anyway, I'm not getting the Home server has to be available 24/7 thing. But I guess that's me. Not meaning to hijack the topic though.

 vvulture,

Thanks for this thread; I've been looking for info on how WHS does power management. I too want to run WHS in a non-24/7 configuration, although I was hoping to be able to rely on WOL. If it's going to wake up every 30 mins then that won't be practical.

If you know with certainty when you need WHS to be available, you could try a scheduled shutdown instead of sleep/hibernate, combined with a scheduled startup, if your bios supports this. The bios will turn on the server at the time you set, and to do the shut down, just create .bat file containing the shutdown.exe command (this is built in toWindows 2003, XP and Vista so I assume it's in WHS too), and then schedule the bat file to run. You could then maybe rely on windows power management to spin down the drives etc when the server is running but idle. 

Some drives have their own spin down settings in firmware. I've seen a few threads on www.silentpcreview.com about this. This would enable them to spin down even if Windows doesn't tell them to, providing there has not been any disk activity.

Another route to lower power consumption is to use low power hardware so that you minimise your idle & peak power consumption. If you could get by with a Via CPU and maybe 2.5" drives then you can significantly cut power consumption. www.tranquilpc.com are claiming < 24W peak power consumption for their T7-HSA which uses a single 3.5" 500GB drive and a Via CPU.

cheers,

Aitor

 

vvulture:

It has nothing to do with non-computer geeks erwos..

Bottom line is, that as server is only meant to stay on 24/7 because it has been deemed that way for so long now...

But times are changing, and so is the humble server...

Basic IT principles can't change on a whim because the home user doesn't understand.