Jails causing regular disk access, move to SSD?

[IceBoosteR]

Hello experienced FreeNAS-guys out in the world,

I am coming up with another question, where I need you knowledge about freenas, disks and all this stuff.
So my problem: I have multiple jails installed on my FreeNAS system: Emby, (MiniDLNA), Owncloud and Urbackup. Those jails are installed on my 10x4TB pool and causing regulary disk access. Some of the jails are checking whether there are new files to index, and some are doing internal stuff. So as these are on my HDD-based pool, the disk heads does always do their job, move away from the parkling position, reading some bytes, and move back to the parking spot. This behavior is causing a lot of Load/Unload cycles, and as all of you know, a HDD is limited to a number of those cylces during the HDDs lifetime.
Do you guys have the same problem? Or do you ignore it, as this might not be a problem?
Can I move my jails to my SSD pool? Usually this can happen with ZFS send/receive and afterwars I need to change jail location - or is it a waste of time to do it? Do I have to change other parameter as well maybe?

How are you in general "solving" this kind of problem?

Any input would we appreciated :)

Cheers,
Ice

 

[joeschmuck]

You have a few options to try, the first is to change the APM to level 254 or 192 and see if the heads stop unloading. The best option for those WD Reds is WDIDLE and change the parking timer to 300 seconds (5 minutes) or to disable. I set my WD Reds to disable and they have been going on for 5 years now without issue. I now have soem HGST drives and I am using the APM setting at 254 and a few at 192 to see how this works. Whichever setting makes me feel good is the one I'll settle on.

I would not move the jails to a SSD but that is just me. It's work and then you must maintain a mirrored SSD pool.

What is the values for the load cycles and how fast is it going up? If it's 10 or less a day, no problems at all in my book. If it's under 200 then you could still live with it. If it's over 300 then I'd have a big concern. The bigger concern would be ID 4 Start Stop count. If this increases a lot then it could cause early failure of the spindle motor.

 

[IceBoosteR]

You have a few options to try, the first is to change the APM to level 254 or 192 and see if the heads stop unloading. The best option for those WD Reds is WDIDLE and change the parking timer to 300 seconds (5 minutes) or to disable. I set my WD Reds to disable and they have been going on for 5 years now without issue. I now have soem HGST drives and I am using the APM setting at 254 and a few at 192 to see how this works. Whichever setting makes me feel good is the one I'll settle on.

I would not move the jails to a SSD but that is just me. It's work and then you must maintain a mirrored SSD pool.

What is the values for the load cycles and how fast is it going up? If it's 10 or less a day, no problems at all in my book. If it's under 200 then you could still live with it. If it's over 300 then I'd have a big concern. The bigger concern would be ID 4 Start Stop count. If this increases a lot then it could cause early failure of the spindle motor.

Hi joeschmuck,

you are always here to help me ;)
First thank you for your input. WDIDLE would be the last step I would take, but I will keep it in mind. First I will test the APM level. It could take some time until I can come back with the topic, as I am usually not in the country during the week.
Moving to SSD is a time effort, you're absolutly right.
So I checked the values during the night. In about 11-12 hours, the "193 Load cycle count" increases by approx. 40.
The start/stop count does not increase in any way, as the HDD are configured by default as "always on".

Also, as I now have an UPS, I have an overview of the power consuumption of my system. So in full idle, 60 watts are needed. If I run my jails, and especially UrBackup (great piece of software) causes the most disk access, and I need about 80 watts. Under full load I need 115 watts. I am sure this are good values, but not the point of this thread :)
Maybe it would be likely more a software improvement, to limit disk access. I am sure it is updating the internal database.
MiniDLNA is always updating for new files every 900 seconds (15 minutes) by default. This can be also increased...

So yes, I need some more testing here.

Cheers,
Ice

 

[joeschmuck]

So yes, I need some more testing here.

Time is on your side my friend. I now have my four 6TB drives all tested and now I've removed them and need to plan out how I want to replace the old drives as they were a six disk pool. Also I just don't feel like messing with the systems just this moment, maybe later this week or during Christmas holiday.

 

[IceBoosteR]

Time is on your side my friend. I now have my four 6TB drives all tested and now I've removed them and need to plan out how I want to replace the old drives as they were a six disk pool. Also I just don't feel like messing with the systems just this moment, maybe later this week or during Christmas holiday.

Hi,

Christmays hollibobs are incoming, did you have a plan for your work? ;)

I have moved the jails to SSD. Was easy with ZFS send and receive. Jail root was updated and everything works like a charm. The problem that the disks alsways span up was confirmed by a developer of one of my softwares installed in a jail. Was an updated in the internal DB. I am hoping that now this problem is solved, as this is why I have a SSD, and it saves me ~10 watts of energy.
I have created also a replication task, to save the jails as a backup.
I will look how this is going on over the day.

Cheers
Ice

 

[joeschmuck]

Christmays hollibobs are incoming, did you have a plan for your work? ;)

Well I'm on vacation now and I do have my new hard drives installed and the old pool has been retired (sitting in a corner for now). I still need to install Plex and setup some custom scripts I previously had running on the old pool. I figure that I will have this all done in about 4 hours, however that 4 hours will likely be split across a few days. I keep getting distracted by family stuff, but that is okay because I'd rather have fun with the family.

 

[IceBoosteR]

Well I'm on vacation now and I do have my new hard drives installed and the old pool has been retired (sitting in a corner for now). I still need to install Plex and setup some custom scripts I previously had running on the old pool. I figure that I will have this all done in about 4 hours, however that 4 hours will likely be split across a few days. I keep getting distracted by family stuff, but that is okay because I'd rather have fun with the family.

Hey cool, thats sounds good.
Take your time with the familiy, hardware is waiting for you to play around later.
Will you use your old drives for backups now? :)
You see, I did not have the time to finish my upgrade-blog for the forum...bad :D

 

[joeschmuck]

Will you use your old drives for backups now? :)

I will but I'm thinking about how I want to do this. A single 2TB drive easily handles all my important + not as important backup data, minus the computer system backups. And the backup computer only has six SATA ports and one must be used for the SSD boot device (this is an ESXi box). So I could use five hard drives in this thing but the actual configuration is the perplexing thing, they may not be a ZFS pool, they could end up as individual vmdk drives. If that is the case then I wouldn't need but two 2TB drives maximum I think. Eh, lots to think about.

You see, I did not have the time to finish my upgrade-blog for the forum...bad :D

Someday you will.

 

[IceBoosteR]

I will but I'm thinking about how I want to do this. A single 2TB drive easily handles all my important + not as important backup data, minus the computer system backups. And the backup computer only has six SATA ports and one must be used for the SSD boot device (this is an ESXi box). So I could use five hard drives in this thing but the actual configuration is the perplexing thing, they may not be a ZFS pool, they could end up as individual vmdk drives. If that is the case then I wouldn't need but two 2TB drives maximum I think. Eh, lots to think about.

Oh, sounds like something you need to think about for a while. I can't give you any advice here, as you know the best what you want to do and how to solve this.
I would always go for any offsite backup, if you have the possiblity to do this (and the hardware). You can encrypt the drive with VeraCrypt and put it at your desk at your office, or somewhere else at work or in a friends house. Just to make sure you have a backup in case that .... happens.
If you have not enough SATA ports, you know what to do^^

Someday you will.

Yes :)
I whish you a Merry Christmas.

-IceBoosteR