Other interfaces for remote storage include iSCSI, Fiber-Channel, Infiniband, RoCE, and others, but those specialized solutions are beyond the scope of this article. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is the most common interface for enterprise storage, first appearing in 2004. Serial ATA (SATA) is the familiar interface used for non-enterprise storage, and is an extension of the original ATA interface dating from the 1980s. In this article we will discuss some strategies and tools to make managing disk arrays on FreeBSD (and related platforms like TrueNAS Core) much easier. It may be what you want is to enable HDD standby, which will “spin down” the drives when not in use
Unfortunately, APM settings don’t persist between power cycles so if we wanted to change disk settings with APM they would need to be reapplied on every boot. Advanced power management levels80h and higher do not permit the device to spin down to save power. For example, a device may implement one power management method from 80h to A0h and a higherperformance, higher power consumption method from level A1h to FEh. To prevent parking more often that is useful (for a server, usually that choice would be “very rarely”), there are a couple ways to do it and which apply will depend on what the hard drive vendor’s firmware supports. With the SMART metrics captured by Prometheus, it’s fairly easy to write a query that will show how often a given disk is parking its heads. Since I use Prometheus to capture information on the server’s operation however, I can use that to monitor that my hard drives are doing well.
Below we will discuss exactly how to do this with FreeBSD’s sesutil or the management tools for your HBA. Though a truism, it bears emphasizing that with a little planning, management and maintenance of storage systems can be made easier and safer. The total throughput possible from the connected disks is still limited by the number of lanes available, but this is likely the best approach in systems with more than a dozen disks.
- Below we will discuss exactly how to do this with FreeBSD’s sesutil or the management tools for your HBA.
- Unfortunately, APM settings don’t persist between power cycles so if we wanted to change disk settings with APM they would need to be reapplied on every boot.
- Of course, all of this chassis management technology isn’t very effective without tools to make it usable.
- NVME-oF allows storage devices and arrays in remote chassis to be connected to local motherboards.
- I moved the system dataset to the boot pool.
- NVMe storage comes in many form factors, from small M.2 devices to U.2 and other hot-swappable formats intended for servers.
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I moved the system dataset to the boot pool. I don’t move any data, no apps are running, this is a vanilla Scale install so far, yet the HDD is in constant work. 1 SSD to boot and 1 HDD to store data. Agree, I have used SeaChest with good results for this same issue on scale plus drive cache. If you do it on a live pool, I’d back up your data first.
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I agree to receive your newsletters and accept the data privacy statement. Ensure device health & easy replacements with these valuable tips. Discover strategies to manage disk arrays on FreeBSD and related platforms/operating systems. Simply installing the apps and choosing a pool for k3s and docker creates a dataset and logs. Your pool gets writes from somewhere and ZFS is writing those to disk every 5 seconds.
Smart Check Intervals & HDD Head Parking
Once you’ve done so, you must test delivery to your “real” inbox—you don’t want to learn that delivery isn’t working after your storage has already become unavailable! If you’d feel safer with a team of experts monitoring your storage, consider a ZFS Support Subscription. If you rely on manually checking on your storage periodically, you will regret it. Another important aspect of managing your storage system is configuring notifications. Klara recommends embedding these details directly into the ZFS vdev properties of each disk—a feature Klara created, which will become generally available in the upcoming OpenZFS 2.2 release. In these configurations, your system may or may not support features like individual “locate” and “fault” LEDs.
If your system has multipath SAS, each disk will be present more than once, and you should use the gmultipathcommand to deduplicate your disks and for labeling as well. FreeBSD supports a number of different ways to label the disk, depending on your use case. The map command displays all of the SES devices and each element (this is the nomenclature in SES) connected to them. Of course, all of this chassis management technology isn’t very effective without tools to make it usable. It also provides information about each slot in the enclosure (even if empty), including a flag to indicate if the device has recently been swapped.
Truenas SCALE Seagate Exos X16 Load Cycling, Heads Parking. Change of Idle_b and Idle_c values
Sounds like the drives being woken for the ZIL to flush writes to the ZFS pool and then going back to idle/sleep every 5 seconds. Enable the checkmark for the Syslog and choose a pool that is not based reveryplay on hard drives. I had this same problem, using HGST data center refurb drives.
Direct Attached
SATA disks plugged directly into the motherboard use an interface called AHCI which does not provide much in the way of advanced management features. For smaller numbers of drives, and for most home systems, the most common way the disks are attached is to the SATA controllers built into the motherboard. Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a newer storage interface that is becoming very popular for flash storage devices. Just download the executable file on both devices and run it to open the tool. At a glance, changing idle3 and EPC settings seems to have done the job nicely; here is the same graph of head park rates per disk as before, but on a smaller timescale that makes individual head parks visible. Seagate provide a “Seachest” collection of tools for manipulating their drives, but rather more usefully to users of non-Windows operating systems like Linux they also offer an open-source openSeaChest.
Monitoring (and preventing) excessive hard drive head parking on Linux
While I have been aware of this in my home server as well, it is easy to forget to ensure that disks are not silently killing themselves by cycling the heads. With modern, especially Enterprise grade hard drives being able to have hundreds of thousands of head park operations in their service life, is this really an isssue? With the tools presented here, the reader is well armed to react to failed disks and ensure that the wrong disk isn’t accidentally pulled. However, if a disk has died entirely, or a slot is empty, it might not have a device name. Sesutil can also be used to locate the disk in the physical array.While the SES data tells us that there is an 8 TB disk in Slot 06, it does not tell us which slot in the chassis corresponds to 06. Looking at a few items from the output, we can see the device names (/dev/da0 and /dev/da7 respectively) of the disks in Slot00 and Slot07.
For ZFS users, automating fault responses with tools like ZED (ZFS Event Daemon) can simplify disk replacement and minimize downtime. Configuring your system to notify you when a disk has errors, or when the filesystem reports a degraded device, will ensure your system gets prompt attention when something goes wrong. Experienced enterprise storage managers also keep extensive notes including the model number, SKU and/or URL for reordering, purchase order information, warranty end date, warranty URL, and any other useful information about each drive. While the operating system typically provides device aliases based on the disk’s serial number, WWN, or some other static identifier, this does not provide all of the information you might want.
My question is – is there a way to tell if a certain disk suffers from the issue prior to purchasing? For the system I’m monitoring here, the SSD that it boots from has a wearout indicator sitting on 95 of 100 (only 5% of the rated life consumed), visibly unchanged for a long time so it’s not very interesting as an example. (The properties like ID_SERIAL_SHORT can be queried on a running system using udevadm info, such as udevadm info /dev/sdd to get the properties of the disk currently assigned ID sdd.) Somewhat more useful for monitoring is the smartmon_load_cycle_count_raw_value, which provides the actual number of load cycles that have been done. Secondly what are your disk monitoring refresh intervals and what do you use on your system to monitor SMART disk health?
I will optimize settings later for the security/quietness tradeoff however, I’m very pleased with it for now. How can I set this value on the Truenas interface? Keeping it spinning but not accessing data is safer. I would still recommend against idling your drive as that reduces longevity. I also set the tunable vfs.zfs.txg.timeout to a somewhat large value so the regular syncs don’t happen every 5 seconds.
Most Seagate disks have configurable Extended Power Conditions (EPC) settings that include timers for how long the disk needs to stay idle before entering various low-power modes. Disk vendors typically provide their own vendor-specific ways to do persistent configuration of power management settings, so it’s worth trying to use those instead so the desired configuration doesn’t depend on the host system applying it, instead being configured in the drive (but in some cases it might be desirable to have the host configure that!). To prevent parking the heads at all a value greater than 128 may do the job (254 is a common choice, as the highest-power setting available), but it’s possible that some disks won’t behave this way because the ATA specification refers only to spinning down the disk and does not specify anything about parking heads. Typical SAS connectors support up to 4 drives per “lane”, but with an expander up to 255 devices are possible. An eight lane controller can only directly attach to 8 disks, requiring more controllers (consuming additional PCI-E slots) to connect more drives. This has long been the interface bus used by most home users to connect their hard drives, and is supported by nearly every motherboard.
- SATA+AHCI improved data transfer speeds, simplicity of communication, and included abilities that we today take for granted, such as “hot swap” and command queueing.
- While I have been aware of this in my home server as well, it is easy to forget to ensure that disks are not silently killing themselves by cycling the heads.
- An eight lane controller can only directly attach to 8 disks, requiring more controllers (consuming additional PCI-E slots) to connect more drives.
- My Seagate Exos enterprise drives make almost 0 noise actually.
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- The settings you mentioned are already set this way.
- In addition to the above query types, SES also supports a number of commands, including activating the “locate” and “fault” LEDs if present, and the ability to individually power off drives.
Obligatory word of warning – mucking with low-level drive settings like this can cause issues. Has anyone found a tool that can use EPC to change the Idle_b and Idle_c values for Exos drives? View an ad to download for free It’s self-hosted and self-managed, so data remains within your company network.Bank-Level EncryptionBanking-standard TLS 1.2 technology protects your computer from unauthorized access. Unparalleled PerformanceOur proprietary video-codec, DeskRT, compresses image data to reduce bandwidth and latency to a level imperceptible to the human eye. With decades of experience in IT management and later as a writer and tutor, she combines technical knowledge with a passion for clear communication.
Unnamed devices can be specified by their specific SES device and element number. This greatly reduces the chance of getting it wrong when you (or the datacenter technician) physically pulls the disk. You can also reboot, and GEOM will pick up the multipath when it first tastes the disks during boot.
I moved my Scale server into the next room, laundry room, just so it’s out of sight. Replacing the drive is financially out of the question. I’m looking for a software solution, if possible, to make the HDD idling for most of the time when there is no load. Yeah, it’s not helping, thanks. Although it’s empty, so this is probably not the source of the constant HDD noise.
Whether you are a computer technician in charge of technical support or a student who needs to work together with their classmates, AnyDesk is the program you are looking for. Then, click on “Connect” to access the other device. Send it to the other user who has the program and they will be able to access and control your device. It is very popular among professionals who provide technical support. Remember, the key is to act quickly and use the right tools for your specific situation. These practices and tools should give you a solid starting point for recovering your deleted files.
In this case, there are at least two disks that I probably need to configure, since /dev/sde seems to be parking as often as about every 4 minutes (0.004 Hz) and /dev/sdc is only parking slightly less often. The smartmon_load_cycle_count_value metric seems like it would be the right one to query, but that actually expresses a percentage value (0-100) representing how many load cycles remain in the specified lifetime- on reaching 0 the disk has done a very large number of load cycles. It does support reading arbitrary metrics from text files written by other programs with its textfile collector however, which is fairly easy to integrate with arbitrary other tools. These communities are filled with knowledgeable individuals who can offer more personalized advice and help you navigate the complexities of long-term data storage.