Will I finally have a reliable server?

[daweed]

Hello everyone
First of all, I'd like to thank the TrueNAS and iX Systems team for making their NAS solution available.

I read the forum rules and did a lot of research before opening a thread.

To be honest, I don't really have any big problems at the moment, I'd just like to know whether my system will be reliable in the long term (you're probably going to say it won't?).

It all started ... (I'm taking the liberty of telling my story with Truenas)

I first virtualized TrueNAS on a small Dell Optiplex PC. I plugged a bay of 4 external hard drives into USB and mounted the USB ports on my Truenas VM.
Browsing the various forums, I realised that this was not recommended.

I decided to have a Truenas on a dedicated machine. That's good enough, isn't it?

But obviously, I wanted to keep my old disks (which aren't that old, by the way).
I'm sure I've still got a non-recommended configuration
You're going to tell me that I don't care about my data. Well yes! before switching from the VM to the dedicated machine I made a backup of my data because I wasn't sure that Truenas would recover my volumes, but as it's a wonderful software, it did!

To make things clearer, and for those who are interested, here's my new configuration:


- Case: Fractal Design NODE 304 Black
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE H610I DDR4 Mini-ITX
- CPU: Intel Celeron G6900
- RAM : Crucial RAM 16Go DDR4 3200MHz CL22 CT16G4DFRA32A (no ECC yes I know ....)
- Power supply: be quiet! System Power 9 400W
- Disks: 4X Seagate BarraCuda, 2Tb HDD - 3.5" SATA 6 Gbit/s 7,200 rpm, 256 MB ST2000DM008 cache (SMR yes, do I really need to specify that ) in RAIDZ1

How do I use Truenas?

Backing up old data, SMB shares for PLEX, Nextcloud ...
A virtual machine for Proxmox Backup Manager...

My current configuration works, I didn't really care before but now I'd like to know if, despite the fact that I don't follow all the recommendations, how reliable is my system?
I'm not a datacenter, can I continue with my current usage?

Why am I asking this?

Because since my new installation, I've been getting some well-known alerts:

I've launched a manual S.M.A.R.T test for ada2 which is in progress, but I don't know why all of a sudden I'm getting these messages.

The purpose of this thread:

What advice do you have? Do I really need to replace my 4 SRM hard disks with CRM disks? What is the real risk (yes data loss, but when? Or will the alerts just be "false positives"?)


I'll fill in the results of the SMART test of the disk mentioned below when it's finished.

In the meantime, thank you for reading.

Daweed.

 

[sretalla]

I'd just like to know whether my system will be reliable in the long term (you're probably going to say it won't?)

It's very likely that it wont.

Whenever there's pressure on those SMR disks, you're going to get the kinds of messages you are already getting about slow IO (in addition to if there are actually issues with those disks).

At one (or more) point(s) you will get drives kicked out of the pool and since you're RAIDZ1, it only takes 2 and your pool is offline.

You may be able to bring it back online after that kind of thing, but it just gets worse the further you go in terms of chances that your pool won't eventually become corrupt and unable to mount.

You already know what you're doing is not what's recommended (actually the exact opposite), so don't expect a good experience (or as good an experience as we would like for you) with TrueNAS.

 

[daweed]

So... Thanks a lot!

I just have to change my hard disks for CRM and I'd be in a slightly better situation?

Is there any best practice for changing all the hard drives with no loss of data and as little disruption as possible?

Wouldn't it be possible to switch to SSDs only? That doesn't solve the SMR / CMR problem I suppose?

 

[sretalla]

I just have to change my hard disks for CRM and I'd be in a slightly better situation?

Correct.

Is there any best practice for changing all the hard drives with no loss of data and as little disruption as possible?

Replace and resilver 1 at a time... ideally with all disks plus one new one in the system while it happens before you remove the old one.

Wouldn't it be possible to switch to SSDs only?

Sure, if you can afford to do it and the sizes work out (the SSDs need to be exactly the same size or bigger or it won't work).

That doesn't solve the SMR / CMR problem I suppose?

SSDs can't be SMR, so I don't see how it doesn't solve the SMR problem... not sure what you mean.

 

[daweed]

SSDs can't be SMR, so I don't see how it doesn't solve the SMR problem... not sure what you mean.

Sorry, I meant that this will solve the problem.

Thank you for these clarifications.

Just a quick question for my personal knowledge, do you know if Synology NAS users also receive similar alerts when using SMR disks?

 

[sretalla]

Just a quick question for my personal knowledge, do you know if Synology NAS users also receive similar alerts when using SMR disks?

Synology doesn't use ZFS, so possibly not.

Although I think there is an option to use BTRFS (which is similar to ZFS in many ways... possibly also in its difficulty working with DM-SMR), so possibly where that is employed in combination with SMR disks, maybe.

 

[daweed]

OK... Thanks again.
As for me, I'm going to try and find some cheap CMR hard drives ...

 

[daweed]

I'll fill in the results of the SMART test of the disk mentioned below when it's finished.

Here are the S.M.A.R.T test results

Show : S.M.A.R.T

smartctl 7.2 2021-09-14 r5236 [FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p7 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate BarraCuda 3.5 (SMR) Device Model: ST2000DM008-2FR102 Firmware Version: 0001 User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm Form Factor: 3.5 inches TRIM Command: Available Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5 SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Thu Aug 17 17:28:59 2023 CEST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled AAM feature is: Unavailable APM feature is: Disabled Rd look-ahead is: Enabled Write cache is: Enabled DSN feature is: Unavailable ATA Security is: Disabled, frozen [SEC2] Wt Cache Reorder: Unavailable === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED See vendor-specific Attribute list for marginal Attributes. General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 0) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x73) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. No Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 203) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x30a5) SCT Status supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAGS VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate POSR-- 053 045 006 - 31936190 3 Spin_Up_Time PO---- 098 098 000 - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count -O--CK 100 100 020 - 19 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct PO--CK 100 100 010 - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate POSR-- 089 060 045 - 768884177 9 Power_On_Hours -O--CK 085 085 000 - 13150h+08m+08.419s 10 Spin_Retry_Count PO--C- 100 100 097 - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count -O--CK 100 100 020 - 16 183 Runtime_Bad_Block -O--CK 100 100 000 - 0 184 End-to-End_Error -O--CK 100 100 099 - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect -O--CK 100 100 000 - 0 188 Command_Timeout -O--CK 100 099 000 - 1 1 2 189 High_Fly_Writes -O-RCK 100 100 000 - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel -O---K 058 038 040 Past 42 (Min/Max 41/42 #7) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate -O--CK 100 100 000 - 0 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O--CK 100 100 000 - 31 193 Load_Cycle_Count -O--CK 045 045 000 - 110321 194 Temperature_Celsius -O---K 042 062 000 - 42 (0 23 0 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered -O-RC- 075 064 000 - 31936190 197 Current_Pending_Sector -O--C- 100 100 000 - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable ----C- 100 100 000 - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count -OSRCK 200 200 000 - 0 240 Head_Flying_Hours ------ 100 253 000 - 5813h+40m+33.547s 241 Total_LBAs_Written ------ 100 253 000 - 3162258158 242 Total_LBAs_Read ------ 100 253 000 - 9262192826 ||||||_ K auto-keep |||||__ C event count ||||___ R error rate |||____ S speed/performance ||_____ O updated online |______ P prefailure warning General Purpose Log Directory Version 1 SMART Log Directory Version 1 [multi-sector log support] Address Access R/W Size Description 0x00 GPL,SL R/O 1 Log Directory 0x01 SL R/O 1 Summary SMART error log 0x02 SL R/O 5 Comprehensive SMART error log 0x03 GPL R/O 5 Ext. Comprehensive SMART error log 0x04 GPL,SL R/O 8 Device Statistics log 0x06 SL R/O 1 SMART self-test log 0x07 GPL R/O 1 Extended self-test log 0x09 SL R/W 1 Selective self-test log 0x0c GPL R/O 2048 Pending Defects log 0x10 GPL R/O 1 NCQ Command Error log 0x11 GPL R/O 1 SATA Phy Event Counters log 0x21 GPL R/O 1 Write stream error log 0x22 GPL R/O 1 Read stream error log 0x24 GPL R/O 512 Current Device Internal Status Data log 0x30 GPL,SL R/O 9 IDENTIFY DEVICE data log 0x80-0x9f GPL,SL R/W 16 Host vendor specific log 0xa1 GPL,SL VS 24 Device vendor specific log 0xa2 GPL VS 8160 Device vendor specific log 0xa6 GPL VS 192 Device vendor specific log 0xa8-0xa9 GPL,SL VS 136 Device vendor specific log 0xab GPL VS 1 Device vendor specific log 0xb0 GPL VS 9048 Device vendor specific log 0xbd GPL VS 8 Device vendor specific log 0xbe-0xbf GPL VS 65535 Device vendor specific log 0xc0 GPL,SL VS 1 Device vendor specific log 0xc1 GPL,SL VS 16 Device vendor specific log 0xc3 GPL,SL VS 8 Device vendor specific log 0xc4 GPL,SL VS 24 Device vendor specific log 0xd1 GPL VS 264 Device vendor specific log 0xd3 GPL VS 1920 Device vendor specific log 0xe0 GPL,SL R/W 1 SCT Command/Status 0xe1 GPL,SL R/W 1 SCT Data Transfer SMART Extended Comprehensive Error Log Version: 1 (5 sectors) No Errors Logged SMART Extended Self-test Log Version: 1 (1 sectors) Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 10% 13149 3763666640 SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay. SCT Status Version: 3 SCT Version (vendor specific): 522 (0x020a) Device State: Active (0) Current Temperature: 42 Celsius Power Cycle Min/Max Temperature: 42/42 Celsius Lifetime Min/Max Temperature: 23/62 Celsius Under/Over Temperature Limit Count: 0/0 SCT Temperature History Version: 2 Temperature Sampling Period: 3 minutes Temperature Logging Interval: 59 minutes Min/Max recommended Temperature: 14/55 Celsius Min/Max Temperature Limit: 10/60 Celsius Temperature History Size (Index): 128 (88) Index Estimated Time Temperature Celsius 89 2023-08-12 11:41 57 ************************************** 90 2023-08-12 12:40 58 *************************************** 91 2023-08-12 13:39 57 ************************************** ... ..( 2 skipped). .. ************************************** 94 2023-08-12 16:36 57 ************************************** 95 2023-08-12 17:35 56 ************************************* 96 2023-08-12 18:34 57 ************************************** 97 2023-08-12 19:33 59 **************************************** 98 2023-08-12 20:32 48 ***************************** 99 2023-08-12 21:31 47 **************************** 100 2023-08-12 22:30 48 ***************************** 101 2023-08-12 23:29 49 ****************************** 102 2023-08-13 00:28 51 ******************************** 103 2023-08-13 01:27 49 ****************************** 104 2023-08-13 02:26 49 ****************************** 105 2023-08-13 03:25 51 ******************************** 106 2023-08-13 04:24 51 ******************************** 107 2023-08-13 05:23 50 ******************************* 108 2023-08-13 06:22 50 ******************************* 109 2023-08-13 07:21 ? - 110 2023-08-13 08:20 30 *********** 111 2023-08-13 09:19 36 ***************** 112 2023-08-13 10:18 38 ******************* 113 2023-08-13 11:17 ? - 114 2023-08-13 12:16 37 ****************** 115 2023-08-13 13:15 40 ********************* 116 2023-08-13 14:14 41 ********************** ... ..( 3 skipped). .. ********************** 120 2023-08-13 18:10 41 ********************** 121 2023-08-13 19:09 ? - 122 2023-08-13 20:08 39 ******************** 123 2023-08-13 21:07 40 ********************* 124 2023-08-13 22:06 41 ********************** 125 2023-08-13 23:05 41 ********************** 126 2023-08-14 00:04 42 *********************** ... ..( 4 skipped). .. *********************** 3 2023-08-14 04:59 42 *********************** 4 2023-08-14 05:58 41 ********************** 5 2023-08-14 06:57 42 *********************** 6 2023-08-14 07:56 41 ********************** ... ..( 2 skipped). .. ********************** 9 2023-08-14 10:53 41 ********************** 10 2023-08-14 11:52 42 *********************** ... ..( 28 skipped). .. *********************** 39 2023-08-15 16:23 42 *********************** 40 2023-08-15 17:22 43 ************************ 41 2023-08-15 18:21 42 *********************** ... ..( 3 skipped). .. *********************** 45 2023-08-15 22:17 42 *********************** 46 2023-08-15 23:16 41 ********************** 47 2023-08-16 00:15 41 ********************** 48 2023-08-16 01:14 41 ********************** 49 2023-08-16 02:13 40 ********************* 50 2023-08-16 03:12 40 ********************* 51 2023-08-16 04:11 41 ********************** 52 2023-08-16 05:10 42 *********************** 53 2023-08-16 06:09 40 ********************* 54 2023-08-16 07:08 42 *********************** ... ..( 12 skipped). .. *********************** 67 2023-08-16 19:55 42 *********************** 68 2023-08-16 20:54 41 ********************** ... ..( 7 skipped). .. ********************** 76 2023-08-17 04:46 41 ********************** 77 2023-08-17 05:45 39 ******************** 78 2023-08-17 06:44 41 ********************** 79 2023-08-17 07:43 42 *********************** ... ..( 6 skipped). .. *********************** 86 2023-08-17 14:36 42 *********************** 87 2023-08-17 15:35 ? - 88 2023-08-17 16:34 42 *********************** SCT Error Recovery Control command not supported Device Statistics (GP Log 0x04) Page Offset Size Value Flags Description 0x01 ===== = = === == General Statistics (rev 1) == 0x01 0x008 4 16 --- Lifetime Power-On Resets 0x01 0x010 4 13150 --- Power-on Hours 0x01 0x018 6 3162224648 --- Logical Sectors Written 0x01 0x020 6 74830945 --- Number of Write Commands 0x01 0x028 6 9262206287 --- Logical Sectors Read 0x01 0x030 6 24247579 --- Number of Read Commands 0x01 0x038 6 - --- Date and Time TimeStamp 0x03 ===== = = === == Rotating Media Statistics (rev 1) == 0x03 0x008 4 13146 --- Spindle Motor Power-on Hours 0x03 0x010 4 5827 --- Head Flying Hours 0x03 0x018 4 110321 --- Head Load Events 0x03 0x020 4 0 --- Number of Reallocated Logical Sectors 0x03 0x028 4 146 --- Read Recovery Attempts 0x03 0x030 4 0 --- Number of Mechanical Start Failures 0x03 0x038 4 0 --- Number of Realloc. Candidate Logical Sectors 0x03 0x040 4 31 --- Number of High Priority Unload Events 0x04 ===== = = === == General Errors Statistics (rev 1) == 0x04 0x008 4 226 --- Number of Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0x04 0x010 4 2 --- Resets Between Cmd Acceptance and Completion 0x05 ===== = = === == Temperature Statistics (rev 1) == 0x05 0x008 1 42 --- Current Temperature 0x05 0x010 1 41 --- Average Short Term Temperature 0x05 0x018 1 53 --- Average Long Term Temperature 0x05 0x020 1 62 --- Highest Temperature 0x05 0x028 1 0 --- Lowest Temperature 0x05 0x030 1 58 --- Highest Average Short Term Temperature 0x05 0x038 1 32 --- Lowest Average Short Term Temperature 0x05 0x040 1 55 --- Highest Average Long Term Temperature 0x05 0x048 1 32 --- Lowest Average Long Term Temperature 0x05 0x050 4 71 --- Time in Over-Temperature 0x05 0x058 1 60 --- Specified Maximum Operating Temperature 0x05 0x060 4 0 --- Time in Under-Temperature 0x05 0x068 1 0 --- Specified Minimum Operating Temperature 0x06 ===== = = === == Transport Statistics (rev 1) == 0x06 0x008 4 143 --- Number of Hardware Resets 0x06 0x010 4 3 --- Number of ASR Events 0x06 0x018 4 0 --- Number of Interface CRC Errors |||_ C monitored condition met ||__ D supports DSN |___ N normalized value Pending Defects log (GP Log 0x0c) No Defects Logged SATA Phy Event Counters (GP Log 0x11) ID Size Value Description 0x000a 2 3 Device-to-host register FISes sent due to a COMRESET 0x0001 2 0 Command failed due to ICRC error 0x0003 2 0 R_ERR response for device-to-host data FIS 0x0004 2 0 R_ERR response for host-to-device data FIS 0x0006 2 0 R_ERR response for device-to-host non-data FIS 0x0007 2 0 R_ERR response for host-to-device non-data FIS

Does it add anything?