However, I noticed that my HDD’s heads park (particulary Seagate Exos) every 3 minutes. ZFS is widely trusted for large-scale storage, but production environments expose design mistakes,… When dealing with critical data, you only get one chance to do it right. The status field is a bitmask supporting a number of different options, but the main ones we care about are 1 (OK), and 2 (FAULTED). When combined with a JSON parser like jq, this can be used to automate tasks for each disk.
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The timer values specified are in milliseconds, so this example will park the disk heads after 30 minutes of inactivity. If we wanted to allow the disk to still park its heads but at minimum frequency, setting the APM value to 7Fh (hdparm -B 127) seems to be the correct choice. Of the three disks that I decided need some attention, I have one Western Digital disk and two Seagate ones.
I noticed that even when doing nothing, I hear the sound of drives working every few seconds. I gave up and just built a Windows Storage Space with tiering and the drives are now effectively silent. I guess it depends on the drives, but don’t think you’ll find any software solution. My Seagate Exos enterprise drives make almost 0 noise actually. The system is never idle really, it’s a server. What causes the constant load on the disk?
Western Digital idle3
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.
- Using the no-op true command on other paths to that disk, will cause GEOM to re-”taste” the disk and see the label and automatically add the additional paths to the existing multipath.
- This greatly reduces the chance of getting it wrong when you (or the datacenter technician) physically pulls the disk.
- So, to activate the LED for the first disk displayed above, we first need to determine the enclosure handle number (0001), and then the slot number of the disk (03).
- 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.
- Direct Attached deployments require a bit more hardware and cabling.
- If you rely on manually checking on your storage periodically, you will regret it.
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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.
Labeling with GUID Partition Table (GPT)
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.
SAS disk reservations provide the ability to connect to the disk redundantly—or even across multiple machines—while ensuring it is only used by one of them at a time. SAS provides many more features than SATA does—including full duplex operations, advanced error recovery, multipath, and disk reservations. It too was an extension on an existing interface bus which offered greatly improved performance. 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. These concepts also apply to other operating systems, but the tools might differ slightly.
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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.
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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
This will activate the fault LED for element 9 (Slot 08) on the first SES device. You can avoid any uncertainty by enabling the “locate” or “fault” LED for the drive you mean to replace. This example creates a new GPT partition scheme on da36, creates a 4 GiB swap partition aligned to 1 MiB reveryplay boundaries, and then adds a ZFS partition with the label e3s01-ZGY0XH87 using the remainder of the space on the disk.
If you need more advanced functionality than mpsutil provides, LSI provides their native tools sas2ircu and sas3ircu for FreeBSD. On my system, this command produces a bright red LED lit for that slot, physically highlighting the correct drive to replace. So, to activate the LED for the first disk displayed above, we first need to determine the enclosure handle number (0001), and then the slot number of the disk (03). This partitions each disk and labels the ZFS partition with the enclosure, slot, and serial number of the corresponding disk. As with a number of tools in FreeBSD, sesutil supports outputting JSON via the libxo library.
- 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!).
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- 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.
- 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.
- The parking rate basically drops to zero at the time I updated the settings for the Seagate drives, and the Western Digital one hasn’t changed because it needs to be powered off to change that setting and I haven’t done so yet.
- This will write a GEOM Multipath label to the last sector of the disk.
- I gave up and just built a Windows Storage Space with tiering and the drives are now effectively silent.
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.
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.
