HDD Fan control
HDD Fan control is a command line tool to dynamically control fan speed according to hard drive temperature on Linux.
This has 3 benefits:
- it allows maintaining you hard drives in the ideal temperature range to have maximum longevity and avoid overheating
Because fans will slow down or stop when not needed:
- it minimizes noise generated by the fans
- it also minimizes power consumption at the same time
When is this useful?
HDD Fan control is useful when you have one or several hard drives with one or several fans close to them, and do not want to let the motherboard control the fan speed, because it does so either statically, or using a temperature sensor unrelated to the real drive temperature (either on the CPU or on some other place on the motherboard).
The ideal use case is for a NAS with several hard drives, a low power CPU (ie. ARM or Intel Atom) with passive cooling (no fans), and a chassis with fans close to the hard drive. It that case the CPU will generate less heat than the hard drives and it makes sense to control fan speed according to the main heat source.
Features
- Can be started in deamon mode
- Can control several fans and/or several drives with a single invocation
- Can automatically spin down drives after a customizable period of inactivity
- Can adapt to different fan caracteristics
- Can be set to stop fans or run them at full speed at customizable temperatures
- Can be configured to never set the fans below a certain speed (useful if the fans controlled by HDD Fan control are the only ones available in the chassis)
Prerequisities
- A Linux distribution
- A least one SATA hard drive, that supports:
- Temperature querying
- Power state querying
- A motherboard which:
- exposes to the OS a PWM to control fan speed
- exposes to the OS a sensor to query fan speed
Most motherboards and SATA drives fit these requirements.
Installation
HDD Fan control needs Python >= 3.4. It probably works with Python 3.3 with minimum efforts, or even previous 3.x versions, but I have not tested it.
- Clone this repository
- If you don't have it, install pip for Python3 (may not be needed with Python >= 3.4).
On Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives, you can install with
sudo apt-get install python3-pip - Install Python dependencies:
pip3 install -r requirements.txt - Install hdparm and hddtemp.
On Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives:
sudo apt-get install hdparm hddtemp.
To query fan caracteristic, you may also need pwmconfig. On Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives, it is part of the fancontrol package, that you can install with sudo apt-get install fancontrol. HDD fancontrol and fancontrol are unrelated. The fancontrol daemon is not needed fot HDD fan control to operate. If you use both fancontrol and HDD fancontrol, be careful not to make them control the same fans.
Usage
A word of caution
The default parameters will run fans at 100% speed at temperatures > 50°C, and run them a 20% speed if < 30°C, which corresponds to the usual recommended drive operating temperature. If you are sure that there are no other components in your system that generate significant heat, if you have other fans to cool down youy system, or if you have a case optimized for passive cooling, you can set minimum speed to 0%, which will stop the fans if temperature is below the minimum threshold.
Be aware that a misconfiguration of this tool can lead to a failure to cool down your system properly which can damage components or reduce their lifetime.
Before using HDD Fan control unmonitored for long period of time, I recommend keeping a minimum fan speed for security, and checking that the temperature of your system stays in reasonable range as expected.
Fan configuration
To get the value for the --pwm, --pwm-start-value and --pwm-stop-value parameters, you can either:
- Use the
-tor--testparameter, which will run some tests and detect the values at which the fans start and stop. However you need to have previously identified the PWM file (the--pwmparameter) - use the pwmconfig tool.
Drive auto spin down
SATA drives can be configured to automatically spin down after a certain period of inactivity, which saves power. If your drives are configured to do so, you may notice that they do not spin down when HDD Fan control is running. This is due to the fact that HDD Fan control will query temperature at fixed interval, which the drive will consider an activity and reset the spin down timeout. To fix that, you can either:
- use a value for the
--intervalparameter higher than your SATA spin down time (not recommended unless your spin down time is very low, ie < 2 min) - use the
--spin-down-timeparameter that will monitor drive activity and spin it down if inactive, independantly of the SATA feature (recommended)
Keep in mind that spinning down and up a drive repeatedly wears a it prematurly, so unless you are in a power constrained environement (ie. laptop), do not set the spin down time too low.
Reading temperature while a drive is in low power state will make it spin up, so HDD Fan control will stop querying temperature in that case, and wait for the drive (which will be cooling down in low power state anyway) to spin up.
Some Hitachi (now HGST) drives support a special way of querying temperature that does not spin up drives, which HDD Fan control will detect and use, however it still prevents them from spinning down, so the above instructions still apply.
Command line reference
usage: hdd_fancontrol.py [-h] -d DRIVE_FILEPATHS [DRIVE_FILEPATHS ...] -p
FAN_PWM_FILEPATH [FAN_PWM_FILEPATH ...]
[--pwm-start-value FAN_START_VALUE [FAN_START_VALUE ...]]
[--pwm-stop-value FAN_STOP_VALUE [FAN_STOP_VALUE ...]]
[--min-temp MIN_TEMP] [--max-temp MAX_TEMP]
[--min-fan-speed-prct MIN_FAN_SPEED_PRCT]
[-i INTERVAL_S] --stat-files STAT_FILEPATHS
[STAT_FILEPATHS ...]
[--spin-down-time SPIN_DOWN_TIME_S]
[-v {warning,normal,debug}] [-b] [-l LOG_FILEPATH]
[--pid-file PID_FILEPATH] [-t]
Dynamically control fan speed according to hard drive temperature.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-d DRIVE_FILEPATHS [DRIVE_FILEPATHS ...], --drives DRIVE_FILEPATHS [DRIVE_FILEPATHS ...]
Drive(s) to get temperature from (ie. /dev/sdX)
-p FAN_PWM_FILEPATH [FAN_PWM_FILEPATH ...], --pwm FAN_PWM_FILEPATH [FAN_PWM_FILEPATH ...]
PWM filepath(s) to control fan speed (under /sys)
--pwm-start-value FAN_START_VALUE [FAN_START_VALUE ...]
PWM value (0-255), at which the fan starts moving. Use
the -t parameter, or run pwmconfig to find this value.
--pwm-stop-value FAN_STOP_VALUE [FAN_STOP_VALUE ...]
PWM value (0-255), at which the fan stop moving. Use
the -t parameter, or run pwmconfig to find this value.
Often 20-40 lower than start speed.
--min-temp MIN_TEMP Temperature in Celcius at which the fan(s) will be set
to minimum speed.
--max-temp MAX_TEMP Temperature in Celcius at which the fan(s) will be set
to maximum speed.
--min-fan-speed-prct MIN_FAN_SPEED_PRCT
Minimum percentage of full fan speed to set the fan
to. Never set to 0 unless you have other fans to cool
down your system, or a case specially designed for
passive cooling.
-i INTERVAL_S, --interval INTERVAL_S
Interval in seconds to check temperature and adjust
fan speed.
--stat-files STAT_FILEPATHS [STAT_FILEPATHS ...]
Filepath of drive stats file (ie. /sys/block/sdX/stat)
--spin-down-time SPIN_DOWN_TIME_S
Interval in seconds after which inactive drives will
be put to standby state.
-v {warning,normal,debug}, --verbosity {warning,normal,debug}
Level of output to display
-b, --background Daemonize process
-l LOG_FILEPATH, --log-file LOG_FILEPATH
Filepath for log output when using deamon mode
--pid-file PID_FILEPATH
Filepath for lock file when using deamon mode
-t, --test Run some tests and exit