I'm very excited about this weekend.
Some new friends I made recently invited me to a craft night at their house with a few other people on Saturday. This may seem mundane, but I haven't actually went and hung out with a group of people since before the pandemic. I lost a lot of my good friends and connections in ~2020, none of us were particularly good at long-distance friendship, plus in the 5 years since, I've had multiple dysfunctional relationships that have kept me out of the "real world". Since I'm newly single again and have no intention of dating anyone anytime soon, I'm working to get back in touch with some friends I haven't talked to in a long time, make new friends, and get back out there and work on my social life. This simple craft night is really my big first step, and it means way more to me than these friends might ever know. I'm sure it will be great fun, but I'm still a little nervous!
On Sunday, I'm going to a picnic! Another activity I haven't participated in in many years. A political action group I joined has a really tight-knit core group of 6-8 of us that I've become really good friends with, and this is our first "extra-curricular" activity outside the scheduled events and weekly meetings. I'm very excited for this, too, for almost the exact reasons as above. I have no idea what food I am going to bring... Maybe I'll throw together a fruit bowl, that'd be nice and refreshing.
I have no idea if it's a QNAP-wide issue, or just some specific models, I haven't bothered to do that much research. I'm guessing that the discs WOULD spin down if you have that option selected if they weren't constantly being pinged a couple times a minute. That constant pinging is the part I can't seem to track down.
An excerpt from a post I was reading while researching this sums it up prettt well: "700 posts about spindown/sleep/standby not working in the QNAP HDD Spin Down Forum. No one seems to be able to resolve it. Qnap clearly couldn't care less."
The only solution that I've found that seems to work is to install some other operating system on it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a turn-key NAS, and is slightly outside my comfort zone right now. I just ordered a kill-a-watt, so I'll see how much power it's taking with/without drives and go from there if it's worth my time to dive into an OS swap, or building a custom rig.