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.
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. My Seagate Archive SMR disk (which began life as an external hard drive and was retired from that role when it became too small to hold as much as I wanted to back up to it) apparently doesn’t support reporting EPC settings (since asking for them says so), and initially didn’t accept new values for the idle timers either. The Prometheus Node Exporter is the canonical tool for capturing machine metrics like utilization and hardware information with Prometheus, but it alone does not support probing SMART data from storage drives. While SSDs don’t have any heads to park, most do report a media_wearout_indicator that represents the amount of data written to the device in relation to the amount that it’s specified to accept before the Flash storage medium wears out.
An essential remote access program
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.
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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.
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?
Preventing excessive parking
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.
- 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.
- Unparalleled PerformanceOur proprietary video-codec, DeskRT, compresses image data to reduce bandwidth and latency to a level imperceptible to the human eye.
- Then, click on “Connect” to access the other device.
- 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.
- I had this same problem, using HGST data center refurb drives.
- NVMe connects storage devices directly to the PCIe bus, offering extremely low latency and high throughput.
- What causes the constant load on the disk?
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.
The settings you mentioned are already set this way. After you apply these settings the logs will be written to your SSD instead reveryplay 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.
Developer reply
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.
At somewhat larger scales, a number of drives can be connected directly to a SAS (or SATA) controller PCIe card. But, if the number of ports on the motherboard is sufficient to your needs, this is the easiest way to connect the drives to the system. We are going to focus on some of the most popular for SATA and SAS drives.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The timer values specified are in milliseconds, so this example will park the disk heads after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- This partitions each disk and labels the ZFS partition with the enclosure, slot, and serial number of the corresponding disk.
- Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a newer storage interface that is becoming very popular for flash storage devices.
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.
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.
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.