Disable HDD power management in OPNsense

[opnfwb]

Greetings, another thread was posted about a Seagate hard drive that was constantly making a clicking noise when using OPNsense. I also experienced a similar problem with my OPNsense installation, I am using a laptop HDD by Western Digital. I previously did not have an issue with this same hardware when running pfSense.

What I discovered was that the HDD was constantly loading/unloading the head. Watching the SMART statistics on the HDD, I could see the load cycle count increase several hundred times in just a few minutes! This caused a massive amount of load/unload cycles on this disk.

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193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   111   111   000    Old_age   Always       -       267890
I was able to stop this activity by issuing the following command to disable APM within OPNsense:

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camcontrol cmd ada0 -a "EF 85 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" - disables APM
I have rebooted the router since issuing this command and APM is still showing disabled. Hopefully this will help other people that may have a similar issue with extreme load/unload cycles on some HDDs. I had to SSH in to the OPNsense firewall and run these commands at the console. Is it possible to have an option to configure this in the GUI?

[opnfwb]

Just following up on this. The setting will survive a warm boot however, they are erased on a cold boot. These appear to be stored in memory on the HDD and shutting off power resets the HDD back. Is there a way to manually toggle this in the GUI so that it is set every time that OPNsense boots?

[djGrrr]

Tools exist for both Seagate and Western Digital drives to make these changes permanently, Seatools for Seagate and idle3 for WD