The Synology Disk Station (DS408) is a fantastic feature rich NAS box, which works flawlessly out of the box however if you want to get the most out of it some advanced configuration may be required. In my case the DS408 hibernation feature caused much head scratching. My DS408 was set to hibernate after 15 minutes of inactivity. This worked when i first got the unit, but over time, as i have enabled more features and installed some of the additional packages it stopped entering hibernation. Obviously something was preventing it from entering the hibernation state. I just had to figure out what it was.

Trial and error is the best way to tackle this problem, as a number of things could prevent the DS408 from hibernating. I started by disabling the following services.

– Web Station / MySQL
– Download Station
– Mail Station
– Webalizer
– UPnP

After disabling these services, (and restarting the device for good measure) and then waiting for 15 minutes the device successfully entered hibernation. So obviously one of the above services was preventing disk hibernation. Naturally if you’re hosting a website from the NAS unit whenever someone visits the site the device will wake from hibernation, this is expected, but it should not prevent the device from hibernating. On these grounds i turned the webstation service on 1st, and then disconnected the router/modem so i was no longer connected to the web, to prevent any incoming connections. Fifteen minutes went by and the device entered hibernation. On these grounds i concluded the webservice was not the culprit.

In a similar manor i tested each of the other services, obviously if you use the eMule service then you will no doubt be seeding to external clients, which will prevent hibernation, so i disabled this but kept the download service enabled. I made sure the download scheduler was setup accordingly, to ensure the device was not downloading when i expect it to be hibernating. I enabled Webalizer again, as i would only expect this to become active when a connection is made to the device from the www, and as i had already enabled the webservice i didn’t expect Webalizer to make a difference.

Mailstation on the other hand is known to prevent hibernation, so i left this disabled, i’m unsure how feasible it would be to run mailstation and expect the device to hibernate. If it’s checking for new mail it’s never going to be idle, and hence never hibernate. Although this feature is nice to have, hibernation is more important.

Finally i disabled UPnP, solely to prevent the indexing service from constantly polling the device for changes, which i’m almost certain was preventing the device from hibernating.

The below table illustrates the status of each service in a successful hibernating DS-408 unit.

1. Webalizer – Enabled
2. Mailstation – Disabled
3. Filestation 2 – Enabled
4. Webstation – Enabled
5. MySQL – Enabled
6. UPnP – Disabled
7. iTunes – Disabled
8. Audiostation – Enabled
9. Photostation – Enabled
10. Downloadstation – Enabled
11. eMule Downloads – Disabled
12. Surveillance Station – Disabled

One final note, many people have reported problems with certain HDD’s and hibernation. Namely the Samsung Spinpoint F1 drives, i happen to use these disks in my DS-408, and with the above services enabled/disabled, the device will hibernate.