Drives constantly cycling - spin on for around a second then off for a second.

[ctiley]

I have a home built FreeNAS operated system on a
MSI B75A-G43 mainboard,
an Intel I7 (I've forgotten the speed but it's about 5 years old) and
32GB DDR4 RAM running
4 x 2TB drives, 1 x Toshiba DT01ABA200V, 1 x Seagate IronWolf ST2000VN004-2E4164, 1 x Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 and 1 x Seagate ST32000542AS.
600 watt power supply,
in a old, very solid full tower case.
The drives are "cycling" - spin on, then spin off, in about a 1 to 2 second cycle (this became apparent due to a loose side panel which was vibrating in sympathy to the cycle.
Is this normal in a NAS?
I would have thought it will be very hard, mechanically, on the drives and would induce early failure compared to a smooth continuous spin at the rate of the drive - Seagates @ 5900 RPM and the Toshiba @ 5700 RPM.
They all cycle in concurrence with each other so it must be a controller thing not a drive related issue. They are all connected to the SATA 3GB bus of the mainboard. There is a single 6GB port but I left that alone for this purpose for consistency's sake.

Thanks in anticipation for some answers!

 

[Evertb1]

is this normal in a NAS?

Yes, no, maybe. Asking if this is typical for a NAS is a very broad question. There is no real answer to that. There are so many NAS devices and NAS appliances on the market that it is hard to tell what is typical for all of them.

If you ask if this is typical for FreeNAS, I would say no. I own a FreeNAS main server, a FreeNAS backup server and a homelab server with a FreeNAS VM. I never observed behavior like that on any of them. But, and that is a biggy, they are all build with suitable hardware.

Your system is build with consumer grade hardware that is not especialy suitable for the job. You can make it work but it's not ideal to say the least. Point is that most forum members use suitable hardware. So you will be lucky to find somebody with the same motherboard for example that can help you out with to the point answers.

By the way: I doubt you run DDR4 memory on that motherboard. It has an Intell B75 chipset that supports DDR3 as far as I know. MSI should still have a support page with the specs. When you ask questions it's important to be as accurate as possible. Otherwise you might get wrong answers or no answers at all.
Best of luck.

 

[ctiley]

Yes, no, maybe. Asking if this is typical for a NAS is a very broad question. There is no real answer to that. There are so many NAS devices and NAS appliances on the market that it is hard to tell what is typical for all of them.

If you ask if this is typical for FreeNAS, I would say no. I own a FreeNAS main server, a FreeNAS backup server and a homelab server with a FreeNAS VM. I never observed behavior like that on any of them. But, and that is a biggy, they are all build with suitable hardware.

Your system is build with consumer grade hardware that is not especialy suitable for the job. You can make it work but it's not ideal to say the least. Point is that most forum members use suitable hardware. So you will be lucky to find somebody with the same motherboard for example that can help you out with to the point answers.

By the way: I doubt you run DDR4 memory on that motherboard. It has an Intell B75 chipset that supports DDR3 as far as I know. MSI should still have a support page with the specs. When you ask questions it's important to be as accurate as possible. Otherwise you might get wrong answers or no answers at all.
Best of luck.

Hi Evertb1, Thanks for the reply. It was a typo about the RAM I meant DDR3 (my current PC has DDR4) and as regards to your criticism of my equipment, the system as described works extremely well and cost me absolutely nothing - it was from equipment I had surplus to requirements and was an interesting project at the time I built it. I'm sorry I cannot boast that I was stupid enough to pay for vastly overpriced "suitable hardware" but the system works very well and serves the purpose for which it was built, and has done for quite a long time. The only thing I have had to replace is a Seagate consumer grade drive that started to fail at 60000 hours so I replaced it with the IronWolf, seamlessly, with no data lost. As it is only a home network for which it is used to backup photo's and act as a file server it is perfect, I couldn't justify "suitable hardware", or, for that matter afford it.

 

[Evertb1]

your criticism of my equipmen

my criticism of your components was a honest observation based on the FreeNAS hardware requirements/recommandations, that are not hard to find on this site. The main reason I wrote that, was to make it clear to you that finding answers for your problem will be hard if it depends on experiences of forum members with the same hardware.

I'm sorry I cannot boast that I was stupid enough to pay for vastly overpriced "suitable hardware"

Buying server grade hardware is nothing to boast about. It is made to last for many years and that is a good thing to have for a server. Expensive is not the same as overpriced, so it's hardly stupid to buy it if you can afford it. By the way, I know nothing about the market in Australia but I know for sure that second hand server components can be very affordable and will do a better job then consumer grade hardware. Take a look at the cpu I have in my main server. I payed 75 euro's for it (around 123 Australian dollars).

As it is only a home network for which it is used to backup photo's and act as a file server it is perfect, I couldn't justify "suitable hardware", or, for that matter afford it.

Everybody needs to decide for themself how important their data is. That is your call ofcourse.

 

[cobrakiller58]

Okay back to the question, my drives do not spin down so i do not have your problem.
Do you have your system dataset on the drives that spin-up then back down?
Why do you want your drives to spin down?
Do you have jails on the drives?
What version of FreeNAS are you using?

 

[pschatz100]

I would go into the bios settings and disable any features you are not using - such as audio and crossfire support. If the system has USB 3.1 support, disable that as well. You don't need it.

Also, disable all power management features in the bios. Some systems let you control power management levels, others just give you the option to turn them on or off. If you can control power management, then limit the max C state to C3. Gaming oriented motherboards often have power management features that are not compatible with FreeBSD and FreeNAS.

Good luck.