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.
Remote Desktop Manager
- 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.
- I guess it depends on the drives, but don’t think you’ll find any software solution.
- If your system has multipath SAS, each disk will be present more than once, and you should use the gmultipathcommand to deduplicate your disks and for labeling as well.
- 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.
- Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is the most common interface for enterprise storage, first appearing in 2004.
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.
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.
Smart Check Intervals & HDD Head Parking
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).
Labeling with GUID Partition Table (GPT)
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.
Program available in other languages
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Verifying settings
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.
If your system has multipath SAS, each disk will be present more than once, and you should use the gmultipathcommand to deduplicate your disks and for labeling as well. FreeBSD supports a number of different ways to label the disk, depending on your use case. The map command displays all of the SES devices and each element (this is the nomenclature in SES) connected to them. Of course, all of this chassis management technology isn’t very effective without tools to make it usable. 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The reveryplay 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.
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.