Bad Sector, HDD matching and General Hardware question

[PhilZJ81]

Hello,

Thank you for reading. So, last Friday, I just got an email from my NAS telling me I have an unreadable / pending sector. I have 6 x 6 TB HGST drives, I had 1 spare, but I had one die a year or 2 ago, so I'm out of spares.
First question, can I just match my 7200 RPM HGST with say a 6TB WD RED (Or what would you recommend I match with?).
I'm running an older version of FreeNAS, I don't remember the version off the top of my head (I'm traveling at the moment) but it was 9x U1 or U2.

Next, I have been giving some serious thought to get new NAS hardware and starting fresh. Currently i have an intel Atom C2750 ASRock board. The poor thing is not in the best of shapes. House got struck by lightning almost 2 years ago now and the board has been limping since. The lightning strike completely fried my Router, partially fried a network switch (some of the ports work, some don't, the lights turn on but devices connected were not reachable) and finally, one of the LAN ports on my ASRock died. For a long time I just used the other port and it worked fine, but a few months ago, even though i use the physical connection of the 2nd port, i have to tell FreeNAS to use network0, not network1 like it was after i plugged the LAN cable in the other physical port.

This NAS box has been on 24/7 for many years, and i am very pleased with the reliability. However, I need several fans in there to keep the harddrives at a reasonable temperature, so I have been giving some thought to a silent NAS using SSDs. High capacity drives are still really expensive, but I'm curious if you guys have some thoughts on a silent NAS setup.

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions.

 

[danb35]

First question, can I just match my 7200 RPM HGST with say a 6TB WD RED (Or what would you recommend I match with?).

You can, though many of the WD RED drives are SMR and therefore not a good choice with ZFS. More info here:

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

 

[PhilZJ81]

Dan, thanks for the heads up!
I found this drive, it's not on the list but according to the spec, it appears to be CMR, "https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-sata-3-5-hdd?sku=WD60EFPX"
thoughts?

I also now realized that I requested some hardware advice on a "Silent" NAS but didn't mention use and capacity. The goal would be to retire my current NAS (in signature). It would run 24/7, duty would be pretty light, not many writes, mostly reads. I use it as a backup for many of my VMs I used for contracting work as well (Images are copied locally to a computer when used, not hosted on NAS) as family photo storage, vacation video storage, backup for my computer, wife's computer, parents computers, and finally Plex server. I'm currently using 26tb so as a minimum I would want that much storage capacity.

 

[danb35]

IIRC, the WD Red Plus drives are CMR. The Reds aren't. Though last I checked, at capacities above 8 TB, SMR isn't an issue, so it hasn't been a factor for me lately.

I'm not that up-to-date on hardware these days. For that capacity, I'd be considering a HPE Microserver Gen10+ (or perhaps Gen10v2) with two pair of 20 TB spinners. It wouldn't be silent, but it would be pretty quiet, and it's decent server hardware, ECC, remote management, etc.

 

[chuck32]

IIRC, the WD Red Plus drives are CMR. The Reds aren't.

Red Plus is guaranteed CMR. Red is a maybe there's SMR models as well as CMR.

 

[Davvo]

Base Red are SMR while Red Plus and Red Pro are CMR: go with whatever CMR drive you feel confortable.
I fail to see the virtualization/VM storage in this thread.
About silent NASes, @joeschmuck recently did the crazy jump. You can easily find his own thread, take a look.
Also, really consider to update to latest CORE/SCALE version. FreeNas 9 is very old.
And consider and UPS.

 

[PhilZJ81]

ok, fantastic, thanks for the info, I'll search for Joe's thread on his silent NAS build. I agree my "OS" is extremely old, I tried an upgrade at some point and it went very sideways, luckily I was able to recover. The NAS is only accessible internally (even Plex doesn't have access from the world) i wouldn't risk it on a software stack so old. Regarding UPS, I do have a pure sine wave Cyberpower unit that's pretty old, but it has been very reliable. The lightning that killed my LAN, I highly suspect that came through my solar panels. The reporting / monitoring module uses a ground line to communicate with the microinverters, and that was hardwired into my network. It was completely fried, along with some other network components I mentioned in my first post. The new module I have has WiFi and that's what I'm using (live n learn).
Davvo: you are correct, I don't run any virtualization/VM on the NAS or from the NAS. It's pure blob storage Plex being the only exception. All my VMs are copied to a laptop or desktop before getting fired up.

Thanks for the feedback on the HDDs and the HPE Microserver suggestion, I'll start doing some research.

 

[PhilZJ81]

First, thanks for the feedback and the direction on where to look for a silent NAS build. After some looking around seems like the Samsung 870 QVO would be a no go for a NAS build. Bummer since they offer fairly large capacity.
Have the NVME drives shown to be more reliable than the SATA SSDs in a NAS environment? I assume if so it would be most likely firmware related?

Regarding my current situation, with one drive showing "Device: /dev/ada4, 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors". Do you recommend I just go through the manager, set the drive offline, swap it out and follow the replace drive process? Or should I just keep going until the drive is bad enough to take itself offline? The volume still shows "healthy". I assume there is no command to tell it "Thanks for the info on the bad sectors, don't use those, keep going... "

thanks

 

[Davvo]

What is your pool layout? Pending sectors don't mean a failing drive: every disk has around 10 spare sectors that automatically replace the bad ones in order to preserve funtionality.
Consider it a drive with an increased likehood of failing; if you are using RAIDZ2 I wouldn't replace it yet.

 

[Stux]

I’d connect the replacement without removing the original, if possible, then choose replace. This does not cause a loss of redundancy other than the already pending sectors.

Alternatively, if you can’t have the replacement and original online at the same time, do a scrub, then offline and replace

I replace my drives once they fail to be able to recall a sector, which is what pending is.

 

[PhilZJ81]

That's correct Davvo, it's a 6 drive RaidZ2. (If that's not a complete answer to what you're asking let me know, I'm very novice at this)

Stux, I do have more Sata ports, they would be on a different controller i believe.

I believe it was during a scrub that the sector issue was discovered. I have it on a schedule (I'm unsure of the interval at the moment) at the email with the error came later that day of the scrub.

If i do keep the drive in there, is there a way to tell it to stop throwing it in console?

thanks

 

[Etorix]

First, thanks for the feedback and the direction on where to look for a silent NAS build. After some looking around seems like the Samsung 870 QVO would be a no go for a NAS build. Bummer since they offer fairly large capacity.
Have the NVME drives shown to be more reliable than the SATA SSDs in a NAS environment? I assume if so it would be most likely firmware related?

The issue with the QVO drive is that it's QLC. But for mostly static storage, it might work.
Large U.2/U.3 enterprise drives are certainly reliable, the issue is finding a source of refurbished enterprise drives at acceptable prices. These use more power than SATA though.

Regarding my current situation, with one drive showing "Device: /dev/ada4, 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors". Do you recommend I just go through the manager, set the drive offline, swap it out and follow the replace drive process?

If it's under warranty, I would initiate a RMA. This drive is growing defective sectors. It's not very worrisome now, but it's not going to improve from there.

 

[Davvo]

Yeah if it's under warranty totally do a RMA.

 

[Stux]

Stux, I do have more Sata ports, they would be on a different controller i believe.

Shouldn’t matter. You can replace. And then swap back to the original controller.

As long as it’s a vanilla sata/sad port and not some raid thing.