Disk spin-down not working on Seagate IronWolf Pro

Hey, I had an issue on my Rockstor system regarding a HDD not spinning down and I would like to share my findings and workaround.

I have 2 drives in my new Rockstor system:

• Seagate IronWolf Pro
• Toshiba N300 NAS

Both are 18TB in capacity, SATA-III and are fairly new models (bought in 2023).

For the Toshiba N300 NAS drive I was able to configure the spin-down settings via Rockstor Web-UI and everything worked as expected.

But the Seagate IronWolf Pro drive was not configurable via Rockstor Web-UI.
The APM column only shows ???, the Power Status is unknown and I can’t press the hour-glass symbol:

And also querying the APM level with hdparm manually showed that this is not supported:

Doing some search on the internet revealed many people with similar issues on Seagate IronWolf & Seagate IronWolf Pro HDDs.
It seems that Seagate has its own tool for power management: SeaChest Utility

openSeaChest:
There is also a open-source version of this tool: openSeaChest
I found this blog entry helpful as guidance for my workaround on Rockstor: Spinning down Seagate Hard Drives in Ubuntu 20.04 - André Jacobs

My workaround:

I was not keen on installing openSeaChest from source on a “production” system, so I downloaded the pre-built binaries form the latest release: Releases · Seagate/openSeaChest · GitHub
File: openSeaChest-v23.03.1-linux-x86_64-portable.tar.xz

• copy tar-ball to Rockstor via SSH ($ scp openSeaChest-... root@hostname:)
• extract tar-ball on Rockstor (# tar xf openSeaChest-...)
• enter the new directory to execute the binaries for setup.
  ./openSeaChest_Info --scan - list all devices
  ./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg0 --showEPCSettings - show the timers for drive sg0
./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg0 --idle_c 600000 --standby_z 1200000 - modify the timers for drive sg0 (idle_c: 60 minutes; standby_z - aka spin-down: 20 minutes)

To check the current power state of all HDDs use ./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d all --checkPowerMode

With:
Device is in the PM1: Idle state = spinning disk
Device is in the PM2: Standby state = not spinning disk

Although some manual steps are involved, this now works for me and these PowerControl settings also survive a reboot.

Cheers Simon

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