Newb: Conflicting alerts (FreeNas 11)

[smartin80]

Hi,

I'm a photographer and MA student in the Uk. I'm wanting to put together a rock-solid NAS box to store images on.

I acquired a used HP microserver and have just spent the day installing FreeNas 11.3-U3.2 on an SSD drive with a pool of 4 x 2tb drives.

So far so good. I have bluffed my way through the install, creating a raidz pool using the 4 disks, giving me nearly 6tb storage. I managed to create an smb share which I can access on my Mac, running High Sierra.

A couple of basic questions though... Was it a mistake to use an SSD Flash drive (Crucial 120mb) rather than a USB drive to host FreeNas?

The zpool I created is "Healthy" but I'm getting alerts that there are various "Critical" uncorrectable disk issues. Aren't those mutually exclusive?

Is there a way to do a thorough disk check? Can't see anything in the interface and no suitable plugins... Can't even see detailed S.M.A.R.T feedback...

Thanks :)

SM

 

[Samuel Tai]

Hi,

I'm a photographer and MA student in the Uk. I'm wanting to put together a rock-solid NAS box to store images on.

I acquired a used HP microserver and have just spent the day installing FreeNas 11.3-U3.2 on an SSD drive with a pool of 4 x 2tb drives.

So far so good. I have bluffed my way through the install, creating a raidz pool using the 4 disks, giving me nearly 6tb storage. I managed to create an smb share which I can access on my Mac, running High Sierra.

A couple of basic questions though... Was it a mistake to use an SSD Flash drive (Crucial 120mb) rather than a USB drive to host FreeNas?

The zpool I created is "Healthy" but I'm getting alerts that there are various "Critical" uncorrectable disk issues. Aren't those mutually exclusive?

Is there a way to do a thorough disk check? Can't see anything in the interface and no suitable plugins... Can't even see detailed S.M.A.R.T feedback...

Thanks :)

SM

You did well to use the SSD instead of a USB stick to host the boot pool. As for the uncorrectable disk issues, what model of hard drives did you use to build your data pool? These errors are very common with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives, and the "uncorrectable" errors are due to the drive using up its small CMR area, and having to relocate data to the slower SMR area, which writes much more slowly, leading to timeouts and uncorrectable errors.

If you go to Storage->Disks, you'll see the disks in your pool. If you can expand each for details of their model numbers, you can look at this resource to see if you purchased SMR drives unintentionally.

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[smartin80]

Samuel,

Thanks for responding :)

You did well to use the SSD instead of a USB stick to host the boot pool. As for the uncorrectable disk issues, what model of hard drives did you use to build your data pool? These errors are very common with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives, and the "uncorrectable" errors are due to the drive using up its small CMR area, and having to relocate data to the slower SMR area, which writes much more slowly, leading to timeouts and uncorrectable errors.

If you go to Storage->Disks, you'll see the disks in your pool. If you can expand each for details of their model numbers, you can look at this resource to see if you purchased SMR drives unintentionally.

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.ixsystems.com

Good to know the SSD drive was a fortunate choice...

I repurposed some older drives temporarily so I'm guessing these are regular CMR drives (They are from four different brands I think) but I'll take care when I do have the funds to buy more.

Is there no way to do a thorough disk check/remap through FreeNas?

SM

 

[danb35]

Was it a mistake to use an SSD Flash drive (Crucial 120mb) rather than a USB drive to host FreeNas?

No, that's a good decision.

The zpool I created is "Healthy" but I'm getting alerts that there are various "Critical" uncorrectable disk issues. Aren't those mutually exclusive?

No, they aren't--they're testing different things. None of the disk errors has, as yet, resulted in an error that ZFS is seeing, so the pool is healthy. The SMART monitoring on the disks, however, is detecting problems, which FreeNAS is warning you about.

Is there no way to do a thorough disk check/remap through FreeNas?

Not to do a remap as such (that would be handled within the disk's controller if at all), but certainly there are ways to do checking. See this resource for one:

fester112:hvalid_hdd [danb35's Wiki]

www.familybrown.org

 

[smartin80]

Thanks Dan :)

No, that's a good decision.

No, they aren't--they're testing different things. None of the disk errors has, as yet, resulted in an error that ZFS is seeing, so the pool is healthy. The SMART monitoring on the disks, however, is detecting problems, which FreeNAS is warning you about.

Not to do a remap as such (that would be handled within the disk's controller if at all), but certainly there are ways to do checking. See this resource for one:

fester112:hvalid_hdd [danb35's Wiki]

www.familybrown.org