Synology NAS not sleeping (Plex?)

I've recently purchased a Synology DS920+ NAS to utilise for Plex and file storage etc. to replace my Lenovo TS150 server. I was hoping that on a night time when the NAS is not being used the drives would spin down, however after installing Plex I am finding that the drives sometimes spin down, but then from the logs are woken up by something or other after 10 minututes or less.

This NAS will likely only be used for <4 hours per day as 'm not a heavy user, but am struggling to work out how I can prevent plex (or potentially other services) from waking the machine up.

Last night I removed all packages that were not installed by default. The NAS stayed a sleep all night for the first time. I then reinstalled Plex this afternoon (and just plex, no other packages), and again it looks like Plex is keeping the NAS awake.

Anyone any ideas on how to stop this behaviour please? I am finding if the drives don't spin down then there is no real power saving compared to running the lenovo server which is a little dissapointing as that was the reason for purchasing the Synology.

Edited by gary333 (Sun 07-Nov-21 19:03:48)

Could you not run a Task Scheduler to schedule start/stop of the Plex service?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Could you not run a Task Scheduler to schedule start/stop of the Plex service?

That sounds like a very good idea if I cannot get to the bottom of the problem, although, I suppose in that case I could schedule the device to shut down in the early hours and use no power

It could be the synology Indexing service as I know my DS216J indexes some folders by default, If you have just added lots of data to it it might need a few days before it sleeps, I know when i set mine up it took about a week as I added around 3TB of data,

In reply to a post by RR_The_IT_Guy:

It could be the synology Indexing service as I know my DS216J indexes some folders by default, If you have just added lots of data to it it might need a few days before it sleeps, I know when i set mine up it took about a week as I added around 3TB of data,

Yeah, i did notice this happening last week when I stuck my data on, However, this problem goes away if I unistall plex or stop the service so I think it's plex related. I have tried turning everything off within plex settings for logging, pinging etc. I have just uninstalled the plex server and reinstalled it (for the 10th time grrr) and am going to try running it locally and not let it link it to my plex account and see if this makes any difference.

It would be good if the Synology could show specifically what is causing the waking up from hibernation rather than it just showing it as an event.

The Synology NAS units can be manually switched On or Off for Wake On Lan.
You can control that through the Synology control panel.
Am not saying that's the solution, but maybe worth looking at.

In reply to a post by gary333:

However, this problem goes away if I unistall plex or stop the service so I think it's plex related. I have tried turning everything off within plex settings for logging, pinging etc. I have just uninstalled the plex server and reinstalled it (for the 10th time grrr) and am going to try running it locally and not let it link it to my plex account and see if this makes any difference.

If the plex server on the NAS is linked to your account, it’s probably trying to ‘call home’ or otherwise sync with the library on your main account.

I had a quick look at mine this morning and I think there’s settings within the server app to change the intervals it does this. Need to have a proper look at it this evening.

In any case Synology won’t be able to log such events at NAS os level, as this is behaviour within the package/app.

In the Synology Control Panel, you can get the device to fully power down and start back up at set times. I have mine to power down at midnight until 8am. You can use the Task Scheduler to do this.

Occasionally mine fails to start back up - but its mostly reliable. Otherwise, as others have mentioned, stopping both the indexing service, and plex during the night sounds sensible

If OP can’t get to the bottom of what pet of Plex is keeping the system awake, then using Task Scheduler to shutdown / start Plex only would enable the rest of the NAS to then gracefully go into low power state, without the occasional artefact of the entire NAS not restarting if scheduling power to the whole unit is problematic.

Happy halfway house?

Cheers everyone. From some very late night reading on the plex forums, it looks like this is a decade old issue that plex are not interested in fixing. I've tried disabling everything within plex, and it looks like even as a local user (not signed in), the same thing happens.

I've been having a look at Emby, doesn't seem as good as Plex, but if it can be left to run and not wake the NAS up all the time then that would be ideal.

I suppose this will all be academic down the line as I want to switch my cameras from their DVR to the NAS, and from what I can see the Synology doesn't appear to spin down individual drives, just all or nothing.

I have 2 synology NAS and I just leave them alone 24/7. I don't use Plex but I too had issues with hibernation. I just gave up and leave them on now. Regarding Emby, there is a free fork called Jellyfin - I run it on a Raspberry pi as I haven't docker on my NAS'. It should work well on your NAS though.

https://jellyfin.org/
https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/

From an endurance, durability and lifetime perspective NAS-specific drives will be perfectly happy running 24x7x365?- in fact more preferable to powering down and spinning them up continually.

My two Samsung SSD cache sticks on the other hand have respectively 1% and 0% life left and have been taken out off the equation by the box….

I sent the Synology back in the end and have just returned all drives to my Lenovo server as even with emby I could not fix the above.

My server will put all hard drives to sleep using 16w when the drives have been spun down and around 25w when spun up and idling. For comparison the Synology was using 21w with all drives awake, but only 7-9w with hard drives spun down (9w standard sleep, 7w some “special” mode.

In reply to a post by gary333:

I sent the Synology back in the end and have just returned all drives to my Lenovo server as even with emby I could not fix the above.

My server will put all hard drives to sleep using 16w when the drives have been spun down and around 25w when spun up and idling. For comparison the Synology was using 21w with all drives awake, but only 7-9w with hard drives spun down (9w standard sleep, 7w some “special” mode.

So the Synology used 16% less power than the Lenovo when awake and 43% less when asleep...

Were you not able to shutdown and restart either of the media server apps simply using the scheduler?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

In reply to a post by gary333:

I sent the Synology back in the end and have just returned all drives to my Lenovo server as even with emby I could not fix the above.

My server will put all hard drives to sleep using 16w when the drives have been spun down and around 25w when spun up and idling. For comparison the Synology was using 21w with all drives awake, but only 7-9w with hard drives spun down (9w standard sleep, 7w some “special” mode.

So the Synology used 16% less power than the Lenovo when awake and 43% less when asleep...

Were you not able to shutdown and restart either of the media server apps simply using the scheduler?

I already owned the Lenovo, thus that was a sunken cost (not only a quarter of the price of the Synology too I may add). The Synology on the other hand was £460 and wasn't going to give me anything more unless it could save energy .

The problem with a scheduled task was it would end the utility of the device making life more difficult as I want the Synology to sleep for the majority of the day when it's not being used. I'd have to have a different schedule for each day and then risk on certain points of the day where I might decide to watch something that the service isn't available. Shutting down just at night would still mean many hours in the day it using more power than it should be doing.

Indeed. Even if your Synology was sitting at low power for say 22 out of 24 hours each day as compared to the Lenovo running at full power 24/7 then the energy saving would be: (25-9)*22=352 Wh per day. If you’re paying around 16p per kWh for power that’s about 5.6p per day

So it would take you 22 years of energy savings to realise the payback in the £460 hardware cost.