Drives spin up while doing reads/writes, Reach full speed and 100% usage, Spindown a little and repeat the process. (Drives set to always stay on)

[SnowyPeak]

I don't have any spindown settings applied. I set them to always be active. I did a few smart tests and the drives pass fine. But they will spin up slowly and make read/write clicks in between points of ramping up which is strange, then they will reach full speed and sound like they are at 100% usage because they start clicking like mad for like 5 seconds then they slow down a little and restart the process over and over and over again. If I restart my NAS it goes away for a bit but then they start doing it again.

System:
TrueNas Core: TrueNAS-12.0-U8.1

Drives:
Boot: Hitachi HDS721010CLA332
Storage drives in Mirrored Array: 2X WDC WD40EFZX-68AWUN0
CPU: I7-2600
RAM: 16 Gb DDR3 (I believe its either 1333 or 1600)
Onboard Network Card.
The system I am using is a Dell Vostro 460 so Proprietary motherboard. I am just using the built in networking.

The Storage drives I bought brand new but the boot drive is a little older. Probably about 5-8 years ish

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

A system troubleshooting guide would basically say to disconnect all but one drive and try to isolate the problem. I'd plug in a System Rescue USB stick and set the BIOS to boot from that first so that your OS doesn't start up by accident, plus it eliminates it as a suspect.

Show : Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 Failure Symptoms

Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 Failure Symptoms:​

• Electrical Failure Symptoms:
  Drive is powered, but shows no sign of function;
  Disk knocking as the motor fails to spin;
  Clicking sound as the heads search or initialize;
• Mechanical Failure Symptoms:
  Clicking, grinding sounds;
  Completely quiet due to ” motor freeze”;
  “music” tone as the disk is powered up;
• Logical Failure Examples:
  Accidental deletion, accidental format, file corruption, software bugs, file system corruption, viruses and malware, and many, many more.
• Firmware Failure Symptoms:
  drive powers up, but is not recognised by the computer;
  Drive powers up, but is recognised wrongly, sometimes with nonsensical characters;
  Drive freezes during booting up;
• Bad Platter Area Symptoms:
  Hard disk still accessible but appear to “hang” or “sluggish”;
  Constant Cyclic Redundancy (CRC) errors;
  Unable to access folders or files which could be seen;
• Complex Failure Model

Somebody is going to ask what controller you're using to connect the WD Red+ SATA drives, and if it's off the mainboard you're going to catch all sorts of grief. (It's off the mainboard, isn't it???)

More to the point, it's kind of sounding like your power supply might be over-taxed. Try spinning up one drive and seeing if just one drive is problematic, because all drives exhibiting those symptoms suggests it's not the drives.

 

[SnowyPeak]

Yeh im just running them off of the motherboard but I had 2 hard drives in here before but I guess I didn't run 3. although if I restart the system its fine for a bit. also how would I go about making a system rescue disk?

 

[SnowyPeak]

Yeh im just running them off of the motherboard but I had 2 hard drives in here before but I guess I didn't run 3. although if I restart the system its fine for a bit. also how would I go about making a system rescue disk? I do have scheduled smart tests but this behavior isnt normal.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Usually people use Rufus to write an bootable ISO image of System Rescue to a USB jump drive.

Personally, I use Ventoy to create a bootable USB drive, then Copy-Paste the System Rescue ISO onto the data partition of the USB drive. The reason I use Ventoy is I can also Copy-Paste the TrueNAS ISO onto the data partition and Ventoy will automatically ask if you want to boot System Rescue or TrueNAS.

System Rescue has a lot of handy tools on it, plus issuing startx starts a Graphical User Interface.

---

If you get that figured out, you can also reserve free space at the end of the USB drive, then create a FAT-32 partition, making:
Partition 1: USB Boot
Partition 2: USB Data (non-writeable when booting off Partition 1)
Partition 3: The data partition you created (mountable as read-write when booting off Partition 1)

It's as easy as:

cd /mnt​

mkdir jumpdrv​

mount /dev/sda3 jumpdrv​

​

Note the 'a' in sda3 needs to be the actual jump drive letter, easily found with:

startx​

GParted​

Log files can then be written to /mnt/jumpdrv
Dismount with umount /mnt/jumpdrv before shutting down the system.