# Near line storage?



## BlueCoder (Feb 19, 2013)

Are there any implementations of near line storage on FreeBSD?

I think I remember reading that with with 9.0 or 9.1 the drivers were changed and SATA drives now support hot plugging and being turned on and off.

Say I want to build a media drive storage array. It holds movies and music. Maybe disc images of old CDROM games for virtual mounting. More or less bulk storage. I see no reason the whole storage array needs to be powered up all the time. All that really needs to stay on is one drive of reasonable size that caches the data files, both reads and writes. When something is accessed that isn't cached then it turns on either one drive or the whole array to retrieve the file and writes out cached written files then waits until finally going back to sleep.

For large media libraries of six or more hard drives it could save quite a bit of power year round so long as the drives are not turning on and off at an abusive rate.


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