Hard drive thrashing?

[Grid21]

So my TrueNAS Server runs 24/7 because obviously, it's a server. What I don't understand is even though I am not writing any data to my drives, why are my hard drives being "thrashed" as in, the heads are making sounds like they're being written to even though there isn't any activity? How do I find out what's going on with the drives and what the activity is?

 

[chuck32]

What I don't understand is even though I am not writing any data to my drives, why are my hard drives being "thrashed" as in, the heads are making sounds like they're being written to even though there isn't any activity?

As in you yourself are not using the disks or the system is not using the disks? Go to reporting tab and check the I/O for your drives, maybe there is activity after all.

Is your system dataset / VMs on your HDD pool?

 

[Grid21]

As in you yourself are not using the disks or the system is not using the disks? Go to reporting tab and check the I/O for your drives, maybe there is activity after all.

Is your system dataset / VMs on your HDD pool?

No, I don't have any VMs running, only a few tasks, but I just adjusted the schedule so I don't understand what is still causing activity?

 

[chuck32]

Is there activity that would be consistent with the noise or is there noise but no I/O?

Where is your system dataset? Are you running any Apps? Or what do you mean by tasks?

I can tell you on a pool where there is no system dataset and no VMs and no apps / jails, there is no I/O on the drives. This should be the expected behavior.

What are your smart test results? How old are the drives?

Please post a detailed overview of your hardware, OS version etc.

 

[joeschmuck]

There are a few things that can cause this. Low RAM as the system continuously uses the SWAP space. Maybe a SCRUB is going on. Maybe you have SMR drives and they are finally reorganizing the data on the drives to make them more efficient. You have given us so very little information to go on which leads us to ask more questions. Please provide your system specs (list the hardware in detail) and answer: Was there ever a time when the system operated quietly for long periods of time? If yes, think back to what you may have done to cause the issue. How full is your pool? As I said, there are a lot of things that could cause this to happen.

 

[Grid21]

There are a few things that can cause this. Low RAM as the system continuously uses the SWAP space. Maybe a SCRUB is going on. Maybe you have SMR drives and they are finally reorganizing the data on the drives to make them more efficient. You have given us so very little information to go on which leads us to ask more questions. Please provide your system specs (list the hardware in detail) and answer: Was there ever a time when the system operated quietly for long periods of time? If yes, think back to what you may have done to cause the issue. How full is your pool? As I said, there are a lot of things that could cause this to happen.

Haha, well to be fair, this is my first using TrueNas so learning how to give the information yall need is new to me. Also, it seems since day 1, it's always made this "noise" of the drives. So unsure what may be misconfigured.

Starting out Hardware wise:
CPU: Intel 4790
Motherboard: Asus Z87-A
Ram: 16GB DDR3
Drives:
Samsung SSD 500GB
Storage volumes: 5 8TB WD Red Plus CMR NAS Drives

I have included a debug log for someone to review and perhaps that will help. Hopefully, it shows when scrub tasks, SMART Tests, and Periodic Snapshot Tasks are done. I've tried to space all of those out so there isn't constant activity. If I need to include anything more, please let me know! And thank you for the help!

 

[joeschmuck]

That debug data could be good if you had a failure, but I don't think you do have a failure.

On the CLI, you can enter top and then you will see a list of programs running.pay attention to it and see if you can identify something causing the concern. Press 'q' to quit.

Also, check the SWAP partition to see if it is being used. If it is above zero, it is being used, a few kbytes is not an issue, a lot is an issue, meaning you ran out of RAM.

If you have many applications running, stop them. Does the thrashing go away?

You can see where I'm going with this.

If you manually setup Scrub times, maybe you did that wrong and you are scrubbing all the time. You will need to do some investigative work because we need you to examine things and feed us the information you find out.

If you have nothing but a virgin system installation, that would be a problem given you have 16GB RAM. In fact, you may need to reinstall the TrueNAS application and then see what happens. If you are just starting things up then you should not have any data that isn't stored somewhere already. I'm also not suggesting you destroy your pool as I don't see how that would cause the issue you are having. But if you do destroy your pool, you can rebuild it. Again, I can't imagine this being a pool problem but if you wanted to start from scratch you might do this.

So lets see what you can come up with. It may take a little time but do not be in a hurry.

Good luck.

 

[winnielinnie]

To rule out the most obvious suspect, where is your System Dataset?

(It is usually moved onto your first storage pool after creation, but it's possible to move it back to your SSD boot-pool.)

The setting can be found under: Menu -> System -> System Dataset

 

[joeschmuck]

But "thrashing" to me is very aggressive hard drive accessing, not an occasional hard drive access. Like a Scrub vs. SMART Short Test. Huge difference. But I agree, System Dataset could be what the OP is referring to.