Exos x10 issues(Might have resolved)

[taylortek]

Hi All, I recently picked up 10 Seagate Exos x10 SAS drives and am having issues adding them to a pool in my truenas scale box.
When I went to add 4 of them to a raid-z2 it gets stuck on fetching.

I also got this notification

Disk(s): sda, sdc, sdd, sdb are formatted with Data Integrity Feature (DIF) which is unsupported.​

Now I did some research and found this article
--> T10-Pi
So I checked my sda drive and it showed Protection type 2 but not 520-sectors
I ran the "sg_format -v -F /dev/sda" to remove it and its taken 2 days!
When it was done I did the same to sdb and its gonna take another two days..
I should have checked sda to see if it indeed removed it but I didn't lol

So my question mainly is am i going in the right direction and is this normal for it to take this long?
I've never heard of this before and I'm fairly new to Truenas as my main box is Unraid.

 

[joeschmuck]

I ran the "sg_format -v -F /dev/sda" to remove it and its taken 2 days!
When it was done I did the same to sdb and its gonna take another two days..
I should have checked sda to see if it indeed removed it but I didn't lol

Yes, check first. Did you know that you can open more instances of SSH for the same user? I open SSH sometimes two instances of root and I will be doing two different things. My point here is you could be formatting multiple drives at the same time if desired. I thin TMUX does something similar but I've never used it.

 

[Whattteva]

I thin TMUX does something similar but I've never used it.

tmux does the same thing as far as I can tell. It just opens multiple sessions and you could be doing different things in each session and even "detach" and leave them running. This feature is actually really useful for SSH sessions and long-running processes that can get interrupted if your network connection gets interrupted. You basically just open a local tmux session and run that long process locally so the process will keep running even if your SSH connection gets interrupted. You could then reconnect a new SSH session and "reattach" to your old session and continue on as if nothing happened.

 

[taylortek]

Yes, check first. Did you know that you can open more instances of SSH for the same user? I open SSH sometimes two instances of root and I will be doing two different things. My point here is you could be formatting multiple drives at the same time if desired. I thin TMUX does something similar but I've never used it.

I wasn't sure if doing multiple sessions would mess up the first operation or not, I'm going to check out tmux now.
Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm going to check out tmux now.

I might as well. I know I used it a long time ago, just wasn't something I really needed at the time.

 

[taylortek]

Ok so the protection on sda is removed and I just started the other 3 drives, cant wait to get em all in a pool so I can finally transfer all my data over from unraid :)

 

[joeschmuck]

I am curious if you could have used something like Partition Magic to speed things up significantly. Just thinking out loud. And if you wanted me to test it out, I'll send you my address and you can ship ten drives.

 

[taylortek]

I ac

I am curious if you could have used something like Partition Magic to speed things up significantly. Just thinking out loud. And if you wanted me to test it out, I'll send you my address and you can ship ten drives.

I actually did try parted magic but couldn't figure out how to remove the protection as when i formatted a drive it was still there.
Haha I got these on eBay refurbished for 700 bucks just hope they don't have issues!
Smart tests seemed good so far though, and the new drives are like 300 bucks each so even if some fail not too bad of a deal.

 

[joeschmuck]

You should run badblocks or solonet to test the drives out.

 

[taylortek]

You should run badblocks or solonet to test the drives out.

What's the difference from those compared to running smartctl conveyance tests?

 

[joeschmuck]

What's the difference from those compared to running smartctl conveyance tests?

LOL, A lot!

smartctl only runs a basic drive test, at most it will "read" all the data off the drive. It does not "write". Badblocks will write four specific patterns designed to test the magnetic recording and reading properties and stress them. If it passes then you can rest assured that the surface is defect free at the time of the test. What happens 2 months later, well you can't test for that, all you can do it the best you can do now.

Solonet does the same type of thing, it hits the drives hard with lots of writing and reading operations, beats the heck out of the drives. Better to find out now when the drives are under warranty than later if there is a problem.

If you are testing very large hard drives, I'm told Solonet is the better tool to use. This would be for 16TB or larger drives. I'm sure smaller drives would be fine too but Badblocks just doesn't like the very large drives.