Stranded Camel
Explorer
- Joined
- May 25, 2017
- Messages
- 79
I've got a five-disk RAID Z2 array made up of WD Gold 10 TB disks that I've had running for about half a year under FreeNAS-11.1-U5. I noticed a while ago that not one of these disks has ever successfully completed a single SMART test.
It doesn't matter if I run the tests under load or right after boot and without firing up any jails or my VM, nor if I run the tests normally or in captive mode, nor if I do short or long tests -- every single test always fails under FreeNAS! The failure consists of either an error (the two I get are "Aborted by host" and "Interrupted (host reset)") or of the test hanging at 90% completion, for weeks if I let it go that long.
So I was naturally worried about having bad disks, bad SATA cables, badly seated cables, bad SATA ports and so on -- we FreeNAS users are trained to blame hardware for everything, of course.
But before I started tearing my box apart and replacing components, on a hunch I booted it up using a live Linux USB stick and ran the smartmontools tests from it. And guess what? Everything works perfectly under Linux! Took close to 20 hours, but all the SMART tests proceeded accordingly and completed properly. No errors by the way.
The version of smartmontools I used under Linux wasn't even particularly new -- it was smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324. The version in FreeNAS 11.1-U5 is actually newer than that -- 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594.
Clearly, the FreeNAS version of smartmontools has a serious bug. The question is, is this a regression or are what look to be the same program (Linux and FreeBSD smartmontools) actually quite different software? I know that might seem odd, but a great deal of software that seems to be identical between GNU and FreeBSD (same names, etc) is actually radically different -- FreeBSD coreutils (
In any case, beware! Before doing anything based on your FreeNAS SMART info, confirm that there's actually a problem by booting into a live Linux distro and using its smartmonutils!
It doesn't matter if I run the tests under load or right after boot and without firing up any jails or my VM, nor if I run the tests normally or in captive mode, nor if I do short or long tests -- every single test always fails under FreeNAS! The failure consists of either an error (the two I get are "Aborted by host" and "Interrupted (host reset)") or of the test hanging at 90% completion, for weeks if I let it go that long.
So I was naturally worried about having bad disks, bad SATA cables, badly seated cables, bad SATA ports and so on -- we FreeNAS users are trained to blame hardware for everything, of course.
But before I started tearing my box apart and replacing components, on a hunch I booted it up using a live Linux USB stick and ran the smartmontools tests from it. And guess what? Everything works perfectly under Linux! Took close to 20 hours, but all the SMART tests proceeded accordingly and completed properly. No errors by the way.
The version of smartmontools I used under Linux wasn't even particularly new -- it was smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324. The version in FreeNAS 11.1-U5 is actually newer than that -- 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594.
Clearly, the FreeNAS version of smartmontools has a serious bug. The question is, is this a regression or are what look to be the same program (Linux and FreeBSD smartmontools) actually quite different software? I know that might seem odd, but a great deal of software that seems to be identical between GNU and FreeBSD (same names, etc) is actually radically different -- FreeBSD coreutils (
ls
, find
, grep
, etc.), for example, are quite different, and extremely limited, compared to their GNU counterparts.In any case, beware! Before doing anything based on your FreeNAS SMART info, confirm that there's actually a problem by booting into a live Linux distro and using its smartmonutils!
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