Constant I/O, no Disk temps on totally new install

[WI_Hedgehog]

Zapomniałem, you are perhaps waiting on a non-Polish solution to the hard drive noise!!??

I use HGST drives so do not have the problem of the noise, but in Poland perhaps that is not so practical. The Toshiba N300 are reliable server drives, so to use for you I understand. In Poland, I would wrap the server in a blanket, and hang a piece of blanket farther in front and in rear as air must flow through the server, but the sound should be absorbed. It is not perfect, but in Poland you have good blankets and to do so is easy, but getting quieter 5,400 RPM drives (instead of your current 7,200 RPM) is perhaps not so easy.

And maybe you have a better solution, that I do not know. Personally, I would turn the server off when it is time to sleep, but not knowing your needs how can I say?

(But I would not program in Python.)

 

[zook007]

...here are details of my set-up. Please keep in mind this was a TrueNAS install in virgin parts, I have no other OS, nor any extra data besides what TrueNAS installed. I only crated by pool of the 2 HDDs and sat there watching the disk activity and temps (the temps eventually went away and cannot get them back). However I did set an alarm for when my HDDs hit 56C, and I did get a notification when this happened, just no plots.

See plot of disk activity I included above. I do understand I can move this I/O to my system pool, which is an NVMe, but to me it seems unnecessary to be writing when noting is happening (no load on the NAS) -- what would the OS be writing ? same thing over and over as nothing is changing while server is not being used ? Do not mean to sound snarky at all, just looking at it practically.

There is this post here too that states, this constant I/O started happening back in 2015 ? and was not an issue before ?
www.truenas.com/community/threads/constant-low-level-disk-activity-since-9-1-2-1.19394/

I cannot find the post on the two RAID worn out NVMes, but will keep looking, trust me, it is there. Maybe Reddit or StackOverflow ? I spent a few hours googling this before posting here.

AsRock H470M iTX
32 GB Ram (2x16)
AMD Ryzen CPU
1 500GB M.2 NVMe WD Blue
2 x 4TB WD HDDs

 

[zook007]

...oops my link to the post is screwed up, not the one I intended, please see bottom of this thread for similar threads "Constant low level dis activity since 9.1.2.1"

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

AsRock H470M iTX is a high-end gaming mainboard with on-board RAID controller, plus non-ECC RAM, my friend. I would think very good for gaming, and not good with TrueNAS. If you put an LSI HBA card in and disable the on-board RAID, your disk problems should lessen.

For server operating systems you may want a server mainboard that can use ECC RAM in ECC mode, because of the heavy RAM usage.

 

[doze5]

Zapomniałem, you are perhaps waiting on a non-Polish solution to the hard drive noise!!??

I use HGST drives so do not have the problem of the noise, but in Poland perhaps that is not so practical. The Toshiba N300 are reliable server drives, so to use for you I understand. In Poland, I would wrap the server in a blanket, and hang a piece of blanket farther in front and in rear as air must flow through the server, but the sound should be absorbed. It is not perfect, but in Poland you have good blankets and to do so is easy, but getting quieter 5,400 RPM drives (instead of your current 7,200 RPM) is perhaps not so easy.

And maybe you have a better solution, that I do not know. Personally, I would turn the server off when it is time to sleep, but not knowing your needs how can I say?

(But I would not program in Python.)

Yes, I have different solution and materials like wood for building furniture + inside soundproofing materials made in Poland with EU certificates and lab tests. I can understand your point of view and blankets - you work with what you have and know, but blankets are hardware solution, not a software one. I don't feel that is a right path.

By the way, is there any line between being funny and being racist? What if I was black or Jewish? Would you change "Poland" or "Polish" with one of those? If not - why is that?

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Yes, I have different solution and materials like wood for building furniture + inside soundproofing materials made in Poland with EU certificates and lab tests. I can understand your point of view and blankets - you work with what you have and know, but blankets are hardware solution, not a software one. I don't feel that is a right path.

By the way, is there any line between being funny and being racist? What if I was black or Jewish? Would you change "Poland" or "Polish" with one of those? If not - why is that?

Yes, we have to work with what we have for the sound (the second) issue, which has since been identified as a second, hardware-related issue; yet now you conflate that with a software solution. I am seeing a pattern.

To your second point, are you suggesting "black" is a race? Or a person of the Jewish religion must be born from Israeli parents? These are not intellectual questions you have asked, and also not on the topic of hard drive issues.

 

[zook007]

@WI_Hedgehog

...I realize my mobo is not "server quality", nor do I have ECC, this is for my home -- I am re-purposing parts I already had. RAID on the board is NOT enabled, so HDDs are not in RAID mode; I made sure of this after learning about ZFS. I do not believe non-ECC memory is causing the constant I/O. Also, mispoke about the CPU, it is an Intel 12 gen with onboard graphics.

While this is not top-of-the-line server hardware, I do not see why that should make a difference ? Perhaps, in a blue moon maybe, non-ECC memory can bite me, but that shoulld not influence the constant I/O nor the absence of temp reporting ?

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

@zook007 : The RAID controller is an immediate concern. The non-ECC mode on memory, not so much. We tend to use "middle-of-the-line or below" server hardware as it is often more than fast enough, but server hardware is not essential.

There are several articles on RAID controllers in JBOD mode acting as an intermediary and causing problems. An inexpensive Avago LSI SAS 9207-8i might solve your issues. I've said this many times but it bears repeating here, @jgreco was kind enough to alleviate my RAID issues with a simple LSI card flashed to IT mode. While I was initially hesitant to embrace this solution, for me it was the simple, fast, correct solution.

 

[zook007]

@WI_Hedgehog The RAID capability of the motherboard is BIOS based, it is a setting in the BIOS for the motherboard, and I have it set so as NOT to be RAID. Many motherboards have this option, this is not a separate add-on card, but a feature option of the motherboard, and am not using any hadware RAID, just RAIDz via TrueNAS on my non-system pool.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

@zook007 : Please see: 5) A RAID controller that supports "JBOD" or "HBA mode" isn't the same.

TrueNAS is a hyperconverged and scale-out storage datacenter grade platform. For comparison, many people here use Windows or Windows Pro, some use Windows Server, few have used Windows Server for Datacenters. TrueNAS by iX systems is like the file sharing portion of WSD, but clean, powerful, reliable. So, this isn't a desktop operating system. Realize iX has provided us with datacenter software (at no charge). It will run on consumer-grade hardware, including gaming hardware, however we need to keep in mind some things do not work well by design, and one of those is using on-board RAID controllers. Having a high-end gaming system RAID controller tends to be faster for gaming, but not good for datacenter usage.

I was where you were concerning on-board RAID, @jgreco saved me a lot of unnecessary pain by saying, "Try this." I listened. It worked. Boom. That easy. So, if you're having storage related concerns, for $30 go to eBay and buy a real, not clone, Avago LSI SAS 9207-8i for about $25 or $30 delivered, a cable off Amazon for $12 delivered, and see what happens. Chances are there will be a few other gaming mainboard issues to resolve, and when those are sorted out you might try the on-board RAID controller again and see how things go. It's "the thing to do" when stepping into datacenter software because it's cheap, easy, and tends to solve most of the initial issues people face. It's a shift in thinking from high-end PC to datacenter, or mid-range server to datacenter, and man, once I accepted that things went extremely smoothly. And yes, I understand it's a home system. If you run RH or Ubuntu the game is different and familiar, but when you step into a datacenter OS your mindset has to reorient, and it's worth it.

 

[zook007]

@WI_Hedgehog Thank you again for the notes. I may give what you suggest a try.

 

[infoman]

in SCALE you need to transfer the logs to the system disk, but that’s not all, Kubernetis constantly writes its application logs, and as soon as you install and run any application, your disk will stop sleeping. For this reason, I allocated a separate small disk for applications.