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.
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.
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.
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 reveryplay ones.

Truenas Scale disk activity every few seconds when idle

Most Seagate disks have configurable Extended Power Conditions (EPC) settings that include timers for how long the disk needs to stay idle before entering various low-power modes. 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!). To prevent parking the heads at all a value greater than 128 may do the job (254 is a common choice, as the highest-power setting available), but it’s possible that some disks won’t behave this way because the ATA specification refers only to spinning down the disk and does not specify anything about parking heads. Typical SAS connectors support up to 4 drives per “lane”, but with an expander up to 255 devices are possible. An eight lane controller can only directly attach to 8 disks, requiring more controllers (consuming additional PCI-E slots) to connect more drives. This has long been the interface bus used by most home users to connect their hard drives, and is supported by nearly every motherboard.
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.

• 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.
• NVMe storage comes in many form factors, from small M.2 devices to U.2 and other hot-swappable formats intended for servers.
• 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.
• I moved the system dataset to the boot pool.
• Of course, all of this chassis management technology isn’t very effective without tools to make it usable.
• 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.
• I set power mode to Idle and advanced power management to the lowest setting (1) which should spin down the disk after 5 mins.

How do I accept a connection request with AnyDesk?

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?

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• These concepts also apply to other operating systems, but the tools might differ slightly.
• I also set the tunable vfs.zfs.txg.timeout to a somewhat large value so the regular syncs don’t happen every 5 seconds.
• These special boards, called SAS Expanders, reduce the total cabling required to provide power and signal pathways to all connected disks.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

Can I setup automatic connection without a password on AnyDesk?

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.

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?

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.