HDD noise every 5 seconds (already moved system pool)

[ragametal]

Like the tittle said, my disks are having some sort of activity every 5 seconds or so, which is notable by their LED as well as a clunking noise. I know that this is usually because TrueNAS writes it's logs on the system dataset which is installed on the first data pool. But this behavior remains even after moving the system dataset to the boot pool (which is on an NVME drive).

I'm having this issue on my 2 systems. My main system is a TrueNAS mini x+ with TrueNAS core 12. On that system the activity seems to be related to the jails that i have running, which makes sense because I have grafana in one of them. I can confirm this because the noise go away if i stop all my jails. So, the solution for this system would be to move the jails to an SSD.

However, that doesn't explain why my second system is doing this. It is a qnap ts-253d with TrueNAS core 13.1 and no jails. The system dataset was also moved to the boot pool. The weird part is that I'm able to spin down the disks of this system which means that the disk activity is not related to any reads/writes.

Then I thought that maybe, because my disks are WD red pros, this noise could be their PWL "Feature". But, if that was the case, why would it stop when i turn off the jails of my main system?

I ran S.M.A.R.T. and everything is normal without high number of load cycles or anything which kinds of confirms it is not PWL.

Do any of you have a suggestion on things to try to silence this clinking noise?

 

[Davvo]

Embrace Seagate
I am interested, following, but I would not exclude them dying (check if it's actually all of them that do the noise).
You could also check the IO reporting to see if you can find a correlation.

 

[ragametal]

...I would not exclude them dying (check if it's actually all of them that do the noise).

I just confirmed that this is happening on all my disks. These are 2 pairs of HDD bought 1 year apart and installed on 2 separate systems. Nothing is impossible but the probability of all of them dying at the same time has to be incredibly low.

I also checked the I/O reporting and they show "0".

I'm starting to think that this is indeed PWL because i booted the system with GPARTED and then with Ubuntu Live and the disks were producing the sound in those environments as well.

If that is the case, then why does the sound go away on my main system when I stop all the jails?

 

[hostany]

Hi. How is it going with the HDD noise?

 

[ragametal]

Hi. How is it going with the HDD noise?

They are the same.
The main system still writes every 5 seconds (i guess i learned how to live with it) and the backup system doesn't do it but that is because i put the disks to sleep.

What amazes me is that the main system was not doing this on core 12. But then again, i installed grafana after i upgraded to core 13 so it could as well be because of grafana.

 

[hostany]

Thanks for update. I just completed my build and tested it with new installed TrueNAS Scale. I can hear the similar HDD noise every 5 seconds once I created the storage pool but no app installed and bool pool moved to SSD.

Now I'm used to it. I think it should be normal. I am using Toshiba MG08 16 TB series drive. Its noise is recognized as being relatively low in its class.