Hard drives spin/pulse every 10-15 seconds

Thumper3

Cadet
Joined
May 31, 2020
Messages
3
New to FreeNAS, got this system setup about a month or so ago as a work in progress.

Running FreeNAS-11.3-U3.2 on a Lenovo Thinkserver TD340, currently have two 500GB WD drives in a mirror just to toy with cause I had them laying around and four 2TB SAS 6.0 drives in a Z2 array. If it matters three of the 2TB drives are Toshiba MG03SCA200s and one is a Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST2000NM0023. I am planning on adding a second Z2 array made of four 4TB drives soon and remove the mirrored 500GB drives as they were just a testbed and playground to learn settings.

As the title states, every 10 to 15 seconds the activity lights for all four 2TB drives flash and they make an odd noise for half a second or so. This is constant, there are no files being accessed on the array, no jobs running and the mirrored 500GB drives do not do this. The noise they make is very hard to describe, like a growling almost. It does this when files are being accessed as well, if I play a video stored on the array on a client machine the activity lights show each drive being accessed randomly for it's part but then they all sync flash along with that growl. No interruption or affect can be seen on the video.

SMART data shows no errors and states health is OK on all drives. I had the SMART check set for monthly short test after running it weekly to start, even deleted this task just in case it was doing some background thing and still have the same issue.

I have attached the readout of the Disk I/O status which clearly shows regular writes occurring, but again, no data is being sent to or read from the array. There is 1.28 TiB remaining on the array empty, the data that is on there was transferred over weeks ago.

Any ideas on if this is normal or if it's something I can correct if it's an issue?
 

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Samuel Tai

Never underestimate your own stupidity
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Apr 24, 2020
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This is normal ZFS activity.
 

Glorious1

Guru
Joined
Nov 23, 2014
Messages
1,211
I think the system dataset gets accessed at about that frequency. If it is set to be on the big pool, you could try changing it to your 'testbed' pool or the boot pool (System > System Dataset) and see if that reduces access somewhat.
 

Thumper3

Cadet
Joined
May 31, 2020
Messages
3
Thanks for the responses!

Yes, the System Dataset is located on the big pool, didn't pay attention there. I'm going to try to move the FreeNAS OS over to mirrored flash drives from the single flash drive I am using now in a few weeks so will experiment with moving the dataset then too.
 
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