Errors on sectors of a drive, now unreadable and S.M.A.R.T. seems to say the drive is OK-ish.

[Vrakfall]

Not really. You can't turn a RAIDZ1 vdev into a RAIDZ2 vdev; you'd have to back up your data, destroy the pool, re-create it as RAIDZ2, then restore your data.

Damn. Then I don't think I have the storage + safeness capabilities to do it atm.

FreeNAS doesn't currently support encryption per-dataset (though I recall seeing that this is on the roadmap for OpenZFS, and if it's implemented there, it should find its way into FreeNAS). A better (i.e., safer) option would probably be some form of client-side encryption software like TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt.

What a bummer. :/ Good that it'd be a thing later. I bet Luks + unencrypted ZFS is a terrible idea / not doable in a RAID system? Or is that what's already used by FreeNAS? I'll look into those software-encryptions, thank you.

Honestly, even if your hardware were up to scratch, I'd probably recommend the same thing. FreeNAS's encryption system seems to be pretty fragile (though I base that only on what I've seen here, not in my personal experience), such that it's really only recommended if you have a legal or regulatory requirement to have full-disk encryption.

I didn't know it was wonky. :/ Though, I didn't have any issue for a few years.

You can't change to a raid z2 pool without destroying everything and rebuilding. The same thing goes for encryption. Encryption is fine just most people lose the key and can't unlock their data. So don't lose the key!

Yeah, then RAIDz2 is off the table right now.
Thank you. ^^ I have multiple duplicates of my keys, I think I'll make even more by pure paranoia.

As to that hardware... In the US, you can get a Proliant ML10 for $200. Add at least 4 GB of RAM (to the existing 4 GB, to make 8 GB, though I'd recommend adding at least 8 GB) and your drives, and you have suitable, modern, server-grade hardware for a very low price. I don't think that has anything to do with what's going on here, but something to consider.

Oh, thanks for the advice/idea! I can find one around the same price in Europe. You got me interested and I'll consider it. Looks like the one I found even already has 8GB of ECC RAM! :)

Thank you all for your enlightenment. I wasn't aware enough of how bad my hardware was and how easy/cheap it is to acquire server-grade old hardware!

I think what I'll do now is temporarily clean+online the faulted disk, order a new one at the same time, replace the faulted disk as soon as the new one arrives. Can that first step harm the system or is just a wonky parity disk meanwhile?
I'll also check if I can go for a Proliant or another good hardware for around that price.

Additional question:
Is Support/Hardware the best place to ask if some piece of hardware is ok, using links to ebay, for example?
Should I look for a specific HDD type? (I guess there are already pinned threads about this, you're not forced to answer that but since I've got your attention ^^)

Edit/P.S.:
I didn't really pay attention to my NAS these last few months/years. I'm trying to correct that.

 

[danb35]

Is Support/Hardware the best place to ask if some piece of hardware is ok

This is fine, or the Will it FreeNAS forum also works.

Should I look for a specific HDD type?

We tend to favor either WD Red or Seagate NAS (I think they're now marked "Ironwolf") drives.

 

[Vrakfall]

Thank you. I'll use Will it FreeNAS then.

Why? Do they tend fail often? Just the red ones? I'm using green WD ones so far in my NAS and the only Seagate there is a scrap one used for temporary files.

 

[danb35]

The Red (and Red Pro) are the WD models designed for NAS use. What that objectively means other than TLER support is unclear, though there's a lot of marketing-speak around them. WD Green are OK, but you want to reset the park timeout so you don't get an excessive load cycle count. In general, though, we prefer drives that are marketed as NAS drives, and we typically prefer 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm.

 

[Vrakfall]

I'm glad I thought about taking 5400rpm ones. :)
I didn't know about the park time, I'll look into it. Thank you again!

 

[scrappy]

Several years ago I purchased a bunch of WD Green 1TB drives while on sale. They have been consistently the least reliable drives I've owned. I am down to my last three 1TB Greens in which two are currently being used as a mirrored vdev for non-critical stuff like Plex DVR recordings. One Green is already giving me some sector error warnings but it hasn't been forced offline yet. Once it dies I'll throw in my last WD Green 1TB and start looking for new drives.

 

[Vrakfall]

Oh wow, that looks quite crappy. Now I'm thinking about that, it's already the second green one that has issues.
I feel like off-topic already but what is/are your favourite/go-to brand(s), of all of you?

 

[danb35]

The bulk of my system is WD Reds.

 

[Vrakfall]

Now I realize I read "avoid" when you wrote "favor". xD Silly me.

Looks like affordable to me.
I can find a 3TB Seagate Firewolf for 95€ when WD Reds are from 100 to 110€.

 

[scrappy]

Oh wow, that looks quite crappy. Now I'm thinking about that, it's already the second green one that has issues.
I feel like off-topic already but what is/are your favourite/go-to brand(s), of all of you?

I am using Seagate 4TB desktop drives as my main FreeNAS storage zpool and another Seagate 4TB in my Desktop for media storage. They have been quite reliable. For SSDs I have three Samsung EVO 850s of various sizes in my Desktop, Laptop, and pfSense router box. They have also been very reliable. Lastly, I use two mirrored Crucial SSDs in my FreeNAS VM/Jail pool plus another Crucial in my desktop also used as a VM storage disk. I have not experienced any problems with Crucial either.

 

[Vrakfall]

Thanks for the feedbacks.
Yeah, I dunno why but Seagate looks more reliable to me compared to WD but only from what I experienced + heard.
I have 2 Samsung EVO SSDs (1 EVO PRO in my desktop, forgot which one, I'll change it when I can check it) and a 840 mSata in my laptops and they've always been wonderful.
I dunno about Crucial, from the name bad memories jump out of my memories: I read some detailed tests on different SSDs a while ago and I think Crucial was way behind. I even heard of a brand that was cheating with their numbers and tried to sell worse SSDs without advertising them like it. I don't know for sure but I think it was either Crucial or Kingston. Ofc, this isn't a verified assertion and one would need to check what I just said and again, it was a few years ago.

I need to drive some long road and it's getting late over here. I'll try posting thread(s) tomorrow in "Will it FreeNAS" to ask advices before buying. I'll keep you up to date in this thread as well.

Thank you again for the eye-opening!

 

[danb35]

I even heard of a brand that was cheating with their numbers and tried to sell worse SSDs without advertising them like it.

Pretty sure that was Kingston.

 

[Vrakfall]

Pretty sure that was Kingston.

Yeah, that's more than probable now I'm putting more thoughts into it.

Also, clearing the device before kick it back in doesn't work and outputs me the same errors.
Is the full replace worth while waiting for the new drive or is there anything else to try?

 

[joeschmuck]

Yeah, I dunno why but Seagate looks more reliable to me compared to WD but only from what I experienced + heard.

If you saw anything on the internet stating this, we would be interested in it. I'm sure Seagate may have the popular vote for Enterprise class drives but it's my gut feeling they do not for Consumer class. One other warning is we generally stay away from drives having the Shingle Recording method. It's not that we feel it's bad but mostly due to it not being very proven.

 

[scrappy]

If you saw anything on the internet stating this, we would be interested in it. I'm sure Seagate may have the popular vote for Enterprise class drives but it's my gut feeling they do not for Consumer class. One other warning is we generally stay away from drives having the Shingle Recording method. It's not that we feel it's bad but mostly due to it not being very proven.

There are areas where Seagate reliability has improved recently. Take BackBlaze's hard drive failure report Q1 2017 for example. With the exception of one 8TB model, most Seagate drives 4TB and larger are proving themselves to be reliable. On a side note: those 4TB ST4000DM000 desktop drives are usually very cheap to buy online. Even though they aren't the most reliable 4TB drive on the market, if you have good storage redundancy and a proper backup, I see no serious reason not to buy them.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

after activating the service, I don't think I changed anything as my past-and-less-experienced me thought the default settings were ok (and weren't generating hours long tests every time). Look at this nasty 30 minutes one in the tooltip:

The SMART service simply checks the SMART attributes that every modern hard drive maintains internally. SMART tests are a different beast and must be configured manually.

 

[Stux]

We tend to favor either WD Red or Seagate NAS (I think they're now marked "Ironwolf") drives.

FWIW, anecdotally, I just had one of my new 8 IronWolfs spontaneously die after about 3 weeks of use. It's currently being replaced by the retailer and I'll start an IronWolf thread when the process is complete.

My 8 Seagate NAS-HD (which afaict are the same things) are about 12 months old now and not had an issue.

Don't recall ever having an issue with dozens of reds.

 

[farmerpling2]

If all things are roughly equal I would take a 7200 RPM over 5400/5900 any day of the week. If enterprise was 10% - 20% more I would buy Enterprise without a second thought.

Why use 7200 RPM?

• They usually come with 5 year warranty.
  
• They are made with higher quality parts and design.
• Because of the above you will generally see better longevity and fewer problems.
  
• Less down time. 2 million vs. 1 million (or less)
  
• *SOME* 7200 use less electricity than the "favored" drives you hear people talk about here. See my spreadsheet to see which ones.
  
• Generally speaking, they use a small amount more of electricity - $2-10 per drive per year. A5 drive RAIDZ2 might cost you only $20-30 more in electricity,
• 20-30% faster.
• Faster scrubs
• Faster replace of new drive into RAIDZx vdev
• If you get Enterprise drives they are designed to last and have fewer problems vs. commercial or home brands.

Only use NAS drives if you care about reliability and recoverability. The cheap drives do not do TLER and in a Z1 with 10TB drives you have a higher failure rate of vdev - 2 drive failure and you are screwed. I have seen it happen more than once and I would sure hate to hear it happen again.

 

[joeschmuck]

If all things are roughly equal I would take a 7200 RPM over 5400/5900 any day of the week. If enterprise was 10% - 20% more I would buy Enterprise without a second thought.

Why use 7200 RPM?

• They usually come with 5 year warranty.
• They are made with higher quality parts and design.
• Because of the above you will generally see better longevity and fewer problems.
• Less down time. 2 million vs. 1 million (or less)
• *SOME* 7200 use less electricity than the "favored" drives you hear people talk about here. See my spreadsheet to see which ones.
• Generally speaking, they use a small amount more of electricity - $2-10 per drive per year. A5 drive RAIDZ2 might cost you only $20-30 more in electricity,
• 20-30% faster.
• Faster scrubs
• Faster replace of new drive into RAIDZx vdev
• If you get Enterprise drives they are designed to last and have fewer problems vs. commercial or home brands.

Only use NAS drives if you care about reliability and recoverability. The cheap drives do not do TLER and in a Z1 with 10TB drives you have a higher failure rate of vdev - 2 drive failure and you are screwed. I have seen it happen more than once and I would sure hate to hear it happen again.

You make some good comments however I don't agree with all your statements. But everyone is allowed to have an opinion.

 

[farmerpling2]

Some thoughts about disk drive "recovery" when you see errors occur.

If the errors are from badblocks, generally, they tend to come in groups/clusters of badblocks based on physical proximity on the disk platter.

What does that mean? The disk platter has a magnetic coating applied to it. When an area fails, the areas around it - think 2 dimensions- (simplistic) in front and behind, to right and to left are areas that could easily fail, also. I expect them to fail, its just a matter of time. Hopefully it is just in a small group so I might end up with 5-10 badblocks in same locale.

At a minimum, take the drive out of the vdev. I usually do an erase (write all zero's) on the drive to see where else other badblocks might be. This will also reset any read flagged badblocks. It will also help fix up any newly found badblocks.

Preferred would be to run badblocks, from the shell, on it. I run 3 patterns on it and it has the best chance to really scrub the platters with a variety of patterns on the disk. This can take days or longer depending on size of disk drive. If you run this and see a few more badblocks appear and all in the same area, it would give me some security that the drive would probably be usable as a vdev member.

Some vendors provide spare "local" revector badblock areas that are on same cylinder. This enables revectored badblocks performance to stay the same. If the cynlinder revector area is full it will then go to a large badblock revector area that is in another place on disk (beginning or end). This affects performance because heads must move to the new location when it is used.

For home usage, this is not a big deal. For enterprise database usage it could affect writes, as the slowest disk drive (e.g. the one that must move the heads to a new location then back) will cause the user I/O to disk on all drives to be seem slower because of that one drive. The drives without badblocks will finish their writes and the revectored one will have multiple internal disk writes to hide the badblock from the O/S.

If the revector badblock area becomes full, the the badblock file comes into affect. If this occurs, dump the disk for NAS purposes, IMHO.

Not all manufacturers will do the above process. I know of multiple manufacturers that do it for their enterprise drives. I cannot promise that home or commercial grade will do this.

For what it is worth...