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.
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.
Remote Control LAN Edition
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. The smartmon_load_cycle_count_value metric seems like it would be the right one to query, but that actually expresses a percentage value (0-100) representing how many load cycles remain in the specified lifetime- on reaching 0 the disk has done a very large number of load cycles. 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. These communities are filled with knowledgeable individuals who can offer more personalized advice and help you navigate the complexities of long-term data storage.
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, reveryplay these commands cannot actually be executed concurrently—instead, they are queued for sequential operation.
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?
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.
Monitoring (and preventing) excessive hard drive head parking on Linux
- 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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- 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.
- 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.
- An eight lane controller can only directly attach to 8 disks, requiring more controllers (consuming additional PCI-E slots) to connect more drives.
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.
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.
Recommended Recovery Tools
I moved the system dataset to the boot pool. 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. 1 SSD to boot and 1 HDD to store data. Agree, I have used SeaChest with good results for this same issue on scale plus drive cache. If you do it on a live pool, I’d back up your data first.
- Then, click on “Connect” to access the other device.
- When combined with a JSON parser like jq, this can be used to automate tasks for each disk.
- 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).
- These special boards, called SAS Expanders, reduce the total cabling required to provide power and signal pathways to all connected disks.
- AnyDesk allows you to establish remote desktop connections between devices and opens up unprecedented possibilities of collaborating online and administrating your IT network.
- When dealing with critical data, you only get one chance to do it right.
sesutil map
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.
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.
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.
Whether you are a computer technician in charge of technical support or a student who needs to work together with their classmates, AnyDesk is the program you are looking for. Then, click on “Connect” to access the other device. Send it to the other user who has the program and they will be able to access and control your device. It is very popular among professionals who provide technical support. Remember, the key is to act quickly and use the right tools for your specific situation. These practices and tools should give you a solid starting point for recovering your deleted files.