HDDs make weird clicking sound every ~5 seconds

[Jimmy G.]

Hi all,

I finally built my FreeNAS machine and it works pretty good so far, however it is close to where I am sitting and there is a constant clicking sound that occurs from the HDDs.

The HDDs are 4 TB HGST NAS drives (RAIDZ2), 10 of them, in a Fractal R5 case, Supermicro MB X10SL7 (flashed in IT mode), 32GB of ECC RAM, 650 W PSU and latest stable FreeNAS.

After first connecting the HDDs I began noticing the noise, but due to me running tests I thought it's regular read/write noise. Now when the system is idle, it still happens. I had the case opened and placing my fingers gently on each drive, trying to see which one it might be coming from, it felt the same on all of them. Basically whenever the noise happens, I can feel each drive move/vibrate a little. I have them tight in the brackets, at least as tight as they will go.

I uploaded an audio file with the noise, it's pretty bad quality, sorry about that, but the noise can be heard at about 3 and 9 seconds.

Any ideas what this noise could be? I can live with the noise, I am just worried that it can damage the drives and lose my data.

Thanks
J

 

[Bidule0hm]

It's normal, it's the writing of the logs to the .system dataset.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

it's the writing of the logs to the .system dataset

... on drives that tend to be a bit noisy, according to reports in these forums.

 

[joeschmuck]

Sometimes it's not the .system dataset if you moved it off and can be linked to a plugin you have running. You can isolate that by simply turning off each plugin one at a time and if the noise stops after turning something off, well you found the culprit.

But as the guys said above, nothing to worry about from an operational perspective.

 

[Jimmy G.]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I will ignore the sound now and not worry about it.

@joeschmuck it was happening even before I enabled any jails/plugins, so most likely not related to any of them.

Cheers