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.
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.
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?
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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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.
For chassis with larger numbers of drives, or when connecting external JBOD chassis, it is common for reveryplay the drives to connect to a specialized board that provides power and routing for the SATA/SAS signals to the controller. When building a storage system, there are many different ways the disks might be connected to the system. NVME-oF allows storage devices and arrays in remote chassis to be connected to local motherboards. NVMe storage comes in many form factors, from small M.2 devices to U.2 and other hot-swappable formats intended for servers. NVMe connects storage devices directly to the PCIe bus, offering extremely low latency and high throughput.
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.
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The 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.
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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.
- Although it’s empty, so this is probably not the source of the constant HDD noise.
- It’s a datacenter drive, very loud, so it’s still audible.
- SAS provides many more features than SATA does—including full duplex operations, advanced error recovery, multipath, and disk reservations.
- If you need more advanced functionality than mpsutil provides, LSI provides their native tools sas2ircu and sas3ircu for FreeBSD.
- Though a truism, it bears emphasizing that with a little planning, management and maintenance of storage systems can be made easier and safer.
- This greatly reduces the chance of getting it wrong when you (or the datacenter technician) physically pulls the disk.
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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.
- 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.
- It may be what you want is to enable HDD standby, which will “spin down” the drives when not in use
- These communities are filled with knowledgeable individuals who can offer more personalized advice and help you navigate the complexities of long-term data storage.
- For drives made by Western Digital, the inactivity timer for parking the heads is called the idle3 timer.
- You can avoid any uncertainty by enabling the “locate” or “fault” LED for the drive you mean to replace.
- This has long been the interface bus used by most home users to connect their hard drives, and is supported by nearly every motherboard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.