SOLVED Drives accessing every few seconds when NAS has been idle for many hours

[oRAirwolf]

I recently switched to FreeNAS and some new drives. Since changing to FreeNAS, I can hear my drives accessing every few seconds. I am not making any requests to the server that I am aware of. I do not have any plugins installed or anything beyond a standard ZFS array with single parity. I was looking at the reports for disk and you can see where it is writing almost constantly. Does anybody know what might be causing this? The noise is kind of driving me nuts and I am afraid this is going to wear out the drives prematurely.

FreeNAS-9.10.2-U3 (e1497f269)
Core i7 3770K
16GB RAM
5 x 8TB WD80EFZX Red NAS

No cron jobs
SMART scans in screenshot below

Any information would be appreciated.

 

[styno]

Hi, I guess your system dataset is pointing to the pool that contains those disks.

 

[nojohnny101]

As @styno said, check where your system dataset is being written to. Under "System" -> "System Dataset".

It is perfectly safe to move it to the boot drive (excluding some edge cases which temporarily require it to be on the pool) and often recommended.

 

[Vito Reiter]

Another note, system dataset on the boot drive when it's a USB can kill it a lot faster. However, USB's are cheap, run them in a mirror, and you can avoid problems and your disks being accessed in the main data pool.

 

[oRAirwolf]

Thank you soooooooooooooo much!!! This fixed the problem for me. I have a cheap little 30GB Corsair Nova SSD as my boot drive, so hopefully it won't wear out too quickly.

 

[danb35]

It is perfectly safe to move it to the boot drive (excluding some edge cases which temporarily require it to be on the pool) and often recommended.

Reasonably safe, as long as the boot drive isn't a USB stick, but rarely recommended--simply because there's rarely any good reason not to have it on the data pool. And no, "so the disks will go to sleep" is not a good reason.