The “Sleep mode turns off my NAS” report was really about hard-drive hibernation, not an intentional ZimaOS system-sleep feature. IceWhale explicitly said the setting was not supposed to put the OS to sleep, and the team could not reproduce the behavior on its own machine.
The original user left before a root cause was found. That means there is no verified fix in the thread, only a reproducible symptom on an Aoostar WTR Max running an early-access ZimaOS build.
What the User Enabled
The setting was intended to spin down idle drives after the selected interval. After choosing 10 minutes, the user said the disks would not resume normal access until the physical power button was pressed.
IceWhale Did Not Confirm That the OS Was Actually Shutting Down
IceWhale asked for a full video and physical-state evidence because the same setting did not reproduce on its test system. The team explicitly distinguished “disk hibernation” from “OS sleep.”
A later IceWhale reply on another thread said internal-drive hibernation had problems for some users in ZimaOS 1.5 and was under investigation. See the disk hibernation status.
Test Whether the Host or Only the Drive Became Unreachable
When the timer expires, try pinging the NAS, opening the Web UI, and checking another storage device such as NVMe. If the host remains reachable but one HDD will not wake, focus on drive/controller power management. If the entire host disappears, collect system logs and firmware details.
The NAS power-state guide provides a useful boundary between intentional low-power behavior and actual shutdown.
Third-Party x86 Hardware Can Behave Differently
The source machine was not a Zima hardware platform. SATA controllers, USB bridges, BIOS power-management settings and disk firmware can all change how standby and wake commands behave.
Test one interval at a time, record the exact disk/controller models, and disable hibernation if the machine becomes inaccessible or requires a hard recovery.
Bottom Line
The thread does not prove that ZimaOS disk hibernation “turns off” every NAS. It documents an unresolved third-party-hardware bug where drives could not be woken normally. Treat the setting as disk hibernation, verify whether the host remains alive, and leave it disabled if your storage controller cannot resume reliably.
