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 will write a GEOM Multipath label to the last sector of the disk. Each SAS Expander will present as a new /dev/ses# device, so your system may have more than one.
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- It is fairly well-known among techies that hard drives used in server-like workloads can suffer from poor configuration by default such that they frequently load and unload their heads, which can cause disks to fail much faster than they otherwise would.
- These practices and tools should give you a solid starting point for recovering your deleted files.
- Keeping it spinning but not accessing data is safer.
- 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.
- If you’d feel safer with a team of experts monitoring your storage, consider a ZFS Support Subscription.
- 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.
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?
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.
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. The other slight annoyance when setting the idle3 timer on WD drives is that changes only take effect when the drive is powered on, usually meaning the host computer must be fully shut down and started back up for any changes to be seen- this makes experimentation to determine how raw timer values are interpreted a slower and more tedious process. Of particular note, WD Green drives ship configured to park the heads after only 8 seconds of inactivity which could notionally wear out the disk in a matter of months if the heads are cycling more-or-less continuously! For drives made by Western Digital, the inactivity timer for parking the heads is called the idle3 timer.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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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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.
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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.
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 reveryplay the multipath when it first tastes the disks during boot.
- These concepts also apply to other operating systems, but the tools might differ slightly.
- Unnamed devices can be specified by their specific SES device and element number.
- SES provides a mechanism to query information from the enclosure, including temperature, fan speed, and status of power supplies.
- Remember, the key is to act quickly and use the right tools for your specific situation.
- 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.
- 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.
When it comes to long-term data storage, there are several strategies and media types that Redditors recommend. It refreshes the disks SMART information every 5 min. ZFS and Btrfs both aim to modernize storage by combining filesystems and volume management, but… Monitoring and maintaining your storage media is one of the most important parts of keeping your data safe.
The settings you mentioned are already set this way. After you apply these settings the logs will be written to your SSD instead of being flushed to the disc array. Those are probably the system logs being flushed to disk every few seconds. I have moved the system data to my boot SSDs, don’t have any apps installed and don’t have any pool set for apps.
The APM specification dating from 1992 includes some controls for hard drives, allowing a host system to specify the desired performance level of a disk and whether standby is permitted by sending commands to a disk. 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. The first step is to map out the relationship between the physical chassis where the disks reside, and the logical devices enumerated by the operating system.
I set power mode to Idle and advanced power management to the lowest setting (1) which should spin down the disk after 5 mins. Hello,Like many users of Seagate Exos drives, I have found that they park their heads very aggressively, approximately every 2 minutes. AnyDesk allows you to establish remote desktop connections between devices and opens up unprecedented possibilities of collaborating online and administrating your IT network. Its primary purpose is to grant bidirectional remote access between personal computers and mobile devices. To do this, both devices must have the program installed and must allow access through the use of security keys. The current settings for a disk can be queried with the –showEPCSettings flag.