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 reveryplay 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 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.
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 boundaries, and then adds a ZFS partition with the label e3s01-ZGY0XH87 using the remainder of the space on the disk.
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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.
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.
- SAS provides many more features than SATA does—including full duplex operations, advanced error recovery, multipath, and disk reservations.
- 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.
- 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.
- The current settings for a disk can be queried with the –showEPCSettings flag.
- Send it to the other user who has the program and they will be able to access and control your device.
- 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.
- It’s a datacenter drive, very loud, so it’s still audible.
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.
- 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.
- These communities are filled with knowledgeable individuals who can offer more personalized advice and help you navigate the complexities of long-term data storage.
- Advanced power management levels80h and higher do not permit the device to spin down to save power.
- This has long been the interface bus used by most home users to connect their hard drives, and is supported by nearly every motherboard.
- 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.
- With decades of experience in IT management and later as a writer and tutor, she combines technical knowledge with a passion for clear communication.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.