External Hard Drive Disk Spin Down Question

[timbucktwo]

Note: I had trouble searching the forum for a relevant discussion on this topic.

I am currently using a 5TB WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive to run all my VMWare backups.

It's running on Windows 10 Pro.

I was going to enable "Allow this computer to turn off this device to save power" inside of device manager for Universal Serial Bus Controllers, although I have read some reports on other backup tools/technology that this will not work well and tends to damage either the drive or the backup process, leaving some data unusable.

I guess my question is simple.

Will Vimalin properly wake a spinning external hard drive disk before beginning the backup process or should I leave the backup device on full power usage at all times to make sure that Vimalin has clean access to the drive when it is time to begin the backup process?

I'd like to save power and the external hard drive, but I have read mixed opinions from supposed industry professionals about turning disks off vs. leaving the running 24/7.

From my research it's best to turn of disks and wake them briefly before the major r/w occurs.

Please let me know what you think is the best course of action or inaction.

Thanks,
P.S. I purchased both Vimalin and Vimarun. Great products!

[wila]

Hi,

Thanks for your question and thanks for liking my products, I happen to like them too.

I'm afraid that there's not an easy answer to this question, this is also why you gotten different answers when searching for an answer.
The reason for that is because it is highly depend on the hardware of your external disk and the specific drivers of the disk.
It is the driver that should handle this gracefully.
Having said that, I'm willing to look into things if it is not working well.
As it is now, Vimalin does not add any additional "disk spin up" delay before it starts writing out data.

One thing I've learned over the past few years is that Vimalin is pretty good in detecting failures to write out files.
A reasonable amount of my support questions have been due to failing external disks.

In your situation I would try to see how it works.
First to see if it does make the backups without failing, after setting the spin down option, then an additional step to make sure.

If it does make the backup(s) without complaining then that's a good start.
The additional step would be to restore a few of your backups that have been made with the disks spun down.

The reason for that is that on restore Vimalin will compare the md5 hash of each file it copied and make sure it was identical to the disk files it copied from the external disk.
If you happen to have issues with restoring then I can look into adding an option for "disk spin up" time.

--
Wil

[timbucktwo]

Thanks for the quick response.
Although I have not been able to test this.
My VMs are not being backed up with the current setup.
It seems something is not working quite right or I have mis-configured my Vimalin.

Is there anything I can do to fix this?
Can I send you my support bundles?
I created two of them.

Thanks.

[wila]

Yes, please email the support bundles to support and I will take a look at what is wrong.
--
Wil

[timbucktwo]

Sorry I have no clue where the support email is.

[wila]

support@vimalin.com

[timbucktwo]

I found out what was wrong with the virtual machines not backing up properly.
One of my machines was using TPM and required a password to be used.
Is there anyway of backing up TPM machines using Vimalin?
If not I realized ignoring the VM for backups was the most effective way of fixing the problem.
I guess you cannot backup Windows 11 VMs...

[wila]

Hi,

Encrypted VM are not yet supported, that's correct.
It should at least give a clear error that it cannot backup the VM because it is encrypted, did it not do that?

re. Windows 11, well.. for a VM you don't actually have to encrypt or enable a TPM. Something I can confirm as I have created a Windows 11 VM here that fails on numerous requirements.
It doesn't have a TPM, is not encrypted and uses BIOS instead of UEFI. It is not that I didn't want to enable all that, it is that the Windows 10 VM I upgraded didn't have any of that either. So I expected it to error out during the upgrade, but it didn't.

This appears to be by design.
To put it in another way. Microsoft relaxes the requirements for virtual machines as was found by VMTN user SvenGus here [1]

To quote SvenGus:

BTW, in this document:

https://download.microsoft.com/download/...f2/Minimum Hardware Requirements for Windows 11.pdf

… they say that certain requirements are ignored when Windows 11 detects a virtual environment:

5 Virtual Machine
Microsoft recognizes that the user experience when running the Windows 11 in virtualized environments may vary from the experience when running non-virtualized. So, while Microsoft recommends that all virtualized instances of the Windows 11 follow the same minimum hardware requirements as described in Section 1.2, the Windows 11 does not apply the hardware-compliance check for virtualized instances either during setup or upgrade. Note that, if the virtualized environment is provisioned such that it does not meet the minimum requirements, this will have an impact to aspects of the user experience when running the OS in the virtualized environment.

[1] https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware...ue#M174764