Other interfaces for remote storage include iSCSI, Fiber-Channel, Infiniband, RoCE, and others, but those specialized solutions are beyond the scope of this article. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is the most common interface for enterprise storage, first appearing in 2004. 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. In this article we will discuss some strategies and tools to make managing disk arrays on FreeBSD (and related platforms like TrueNAS Core) much easier. It may be what you want is to enable HDD standby, which will “spin down” the drives when not in use
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.
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.

• ZFS is widely trusted for large-scale storage, but production environments expose design mistakes,…
• 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.
• I would still recommend against idling your drive as that reduces longevity.
• 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.
• Yeah, it’s not helping, thanks.
• Replacing the drive is financially out of the question.
• 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.

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.

sesutil map

• Many backplanes include support for SCSI Enclosure Services (SES).
• Each SAS Expander will present as a new /dev/ses# device, so your system may have more than one.
• 1 SSD to boot and 1 HDD to store data.
• The map command displays all of the SES devices and each element (this is the nomenclature in SES) connected to them.
• It is very popular among professionals who provide technical support.

I agree to receive your newsletters and accept the data privacy statement. reveryplay 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.
I moved my Scale server into the next room, laundry room, just so it’s out of sight. Replacing the drive is financially out of the question. I’m looking for a software solution, if possible, to make the HDD idling for most of the time when there is no load. Yeah, it’s not helping, thanks. Although it’s empty, so this is probably not the source of the constant HDD noise.
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?
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.

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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.
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.

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SATA disks plugged directly into the motherboard use an interface called AHCI which does not provide much in the way of advanced management features. For smaller numbers of drives, and for most home systems, the most common way the disks are attached is to the SATA controllers built into the motherboard. Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a newer storage interface that is becoming very popular for flash storage devices. Just download the executable file on both devices and run it to open the tool. 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. 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.

Truenas SCALE Seagate Exos X16 Load Cycling, Heads Parking. Change of Idle_b and Idle_c values

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.
Once you’ve done so, you must test delivery to your “real” inbox—you don’t want to learn that delivery isn’t working after your storage has already become unavailable! If you’d feel safer with a team of experts monitoring your storage, consider a ZFS Support Subscription. If you rely on manually checking on your storage periodically, you will regret it. Another important aspect of managing your storage system is configuring notifications. Klara recommends embedding these details directly into the ZFS vdev properties of each disk—a feature Klara created, which will become generally available in the upcoming OpenZFS 2.2 release. In these configurations, your system may or may not support features like individual “locate” and “fault” LEDs.

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.
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.
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.

Smart Check Intervals & HDD Head Parking

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.