cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/foss@beehaw.org/t/1225798
After: ~1,337 days, 271 releases, 78,000 stars on GitHub, 1,558 contributors, 31,500 members on Discord, 36,000 members on Reddit, 68 languages on Weblate, Surviving the controversial announcement about joining FUTO, Having overwhelming success and support from the community with the product keys model, Launching the Merch store, Attending our first FOSDEM, …and before the release of GTA VI We are thrilled to announce the stable release of Immich! 🎉
I’m really excited about such a large project adopting semver! I never got the trend for software without a need for rapid release cycles adopting purely time-based version numbers.
This is fantastic to see, but I recently moved away from Immich with heavy heart because of a simple issue.
I have a very minimal setup with just a RasberryPi and an external hard drive, I don’t need to access anything from outside my home so it is not setup to be accessible via internet, just Wifi.
Since I am not home all the time I set it up that the hard drive goes to sleep after an hour or so of inactivity. It is not unusal that this means it gets to be in sleep mode for 8-10 hours once or twice per day, which I’d assume is better for its life expectancy.
Since an update this year though something changed for Immich, I think it was connected to the postgres database… sorry, don’t remember fully since this was like 2 months ago. It would keep checking or writing on the drive and thus keep it awake the entire day. 24/7.
I found some issues on github that mentioned this from months ago and they didn’t come to a good conclusion how to solve this, so unless this is adressed I cannot use Immich, sadly. Putting postgres on the SD card instead would probably suck for how long that one will be alive.
Edit: if anyone is interested, here is one issue I found on github that describes this https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/15918
Edit2: found another https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/11569 Apparently it was healthchecks and I didn’t test if that would solve the issue for me, I might try again with a small setup.
It’s actually the opposite.
How so?
Spinning up and down puts parts under more stress than simply spinning constantly, assuming vibrations are minimal. Basically repeated changes in velocity are bad for mechanical parts, compared to just spinning at a constant rate.
Thank you for giving an actual answer. But this makes me wonder, there must be some middle ground where spinning it down is not worse than keeping it running. E.g. only spinning down and up once a day or once every few hours, is there any data for that you know of?
Hard drives are so variable and failures so unpredictable, I bet you can’t find that information. Most of the actual data about hard drive failures, like Backblaze’s reports, are for drives that don’t spin down.
That said, spin-down has always been used for saving power, not drive lifetime. I would generally assume spinning down never extends lifetime. Even in the case of an external hard drive you plug in once a month - it is very likely going to fail earlier than the drive spinning 24x7.
Also, I wouldn’t shy from keeping the database on the same, fast storage as the OS, even if that’s flash. Move to an external SSD when you can. HDDs have such long seek times.
Welp, TIL, thanks everyone for the useful detailed answers.
Very much true. I installed Immich on my dads Synology for him and compared to my own setup at home the speeds are abysmall (it even crased a few times during the first indexing and ML run). I suspect a major part is that the whole os runs on an hdd.
If you put the database on an sd-card just ensure you make frequent backups somwhere else. I wouldn’t trust flash storage to keep my data safe.
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It is worse for life expectancy.
Cool beans.
Your’s is an interesting edge case but maybe the best solution is keeping a folder full of pics on an external drive and plugging it in only when you need it?