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.
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.
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.
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
- These concepts also apply to other operating systems, but the tools might differ slightly.
- 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.
- SES provides a mechanism to query information from the enclosure, including temperature, fan speed, and status of power supplies.
- Unnamed devices can be specified by their specific SES device and element number.
- 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.
- Remember, the key is to act quickly and use the right tools for your specific situation.
An essential remote access program
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 on hard drives. I had this same problem, using HGST data center refurb drives.
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.
FreeBSD’s sesutil is a tool to interface with the SES devices on your system. You should also configure smartd to monitor your disks and send you alerts, which may give you advanced notice when a drive is starting to fail. These special boards, called SAS Expanders, reduce the total cabling required to provide power and signal pathways to all connected disks.
- This will activate the fault LED for element 9 (Slot 08) on the first SES device.
- Another important aspect of managing your storage system is configuring notifications.
- 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.
- Discover strategies to manage disk arrays on FreeBSD and related platforms/operating systems.
- 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!
- As with a number of tools in FreeBSD, sesutil supports outputting JSON via the libxo library.
- 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.
We can also see that the disk in Slot07 was recently swapped, and that Slot08 does not contain a disk and its locate LED is activated. SES provides a mechanism to query information from the enclosure, including temperature, fan speed, and status of power supplies. Many backplanes include support for SCSI Enclosure Services (SES).
Direct Attached deployments require a bit more hardware and cabling. The NVMe interface is also extensible to allow operating over the network (where it is known as NVMe Over Fabric or NVMe-oF). NVMe on the other hand, supports multiple queues (often 64 queues, but the official specification allows for up to 65,536 queues) allowing for many commands to be run concurrently. While both SATA and SAS allow multiple commands to be issued at once to the device, these commands cannot actually be executed concurrently—instead, they are queued for sequential operation.
It’s hard to imagine why your drives are that loud! It’s a datacenter drive, very loud, so it’s still audible. For quietness, a noise reducing case, move it somewhere else, quieter drives, maybe SSD instead of hard drives, etc.
Connect to a computer or mobile device remotely, whether it’s across town or halfway around the world.
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.
How do I accept a connection request with AnyDesk?
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.
Understanding Storage Protocols
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.
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.
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.
Western Digital idle3
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.
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.
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 reveryplay 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.
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.
