Newbie question, FreeNAS 9.3, "inactive" server accesses all disks once every 5 secs or so.

[n3mmr]

I sort of feel this box ought to be basically inert; I'm not accessing anything, nothing is being downloaded, but I can hear and see (activity lights) some disk activity every few seconds.

I'm just wondering if there's some tool to show me what it's doing, and the reason for this activity.
I have a Solaris machine with a mirrored pair of 2TB data disks, and those disks were always so inactive they would actually spin down most of the time. The FreeNAS is a 5x4TB raidz2.

The Solaris used to serve up exactly the same data as the FreeNAS is serving up now.

I'm not worried, just curious.

 

[dlavigne]

Any activity in /var/log/messages?

 

[n3mmr]

Any activity in /var/log/messages?

None.

 

[Bidule0hm]

This is probably normal and it's just the logs that are written to the pool.

 

[n3mmr]

Why write logs when there's no activity?

 

[DrKK]

Why do we have to answer this question 10-15 times per week.

FreeNAS writes logs of CPU usage, ARC usage, network usage, everything else, all the time, for your "REPORTING" graphs, as well as debug information.

That is the activity.

 

[n3mmr]

Why do we have to answer this question 10-15 times per week.

FreeNAS writes logs of CPU usage, ARC usage, network usage, everything else, all the time, for your "REPORTING" graphs, as well as debug information.

That is the activity.

Why?
In this case because I didn't think properly...

 

[n3mmr]

So I should have installed freenas on a mirror of two small, fast disks, like ssd with proper power loss protection, and added the large expensive disks afterwards as a new zpool.

 

[SweetAndLow]

So I should have installed freenas on a mirror of two small, fast disks, like ssd with proper power loss protection, and added the large expensive disks afterwards as a new zpool.

Why on earth would you do that?

 

[n3mmr]

To keep the disks quiet? On the other hand, maybe the report writing bit won't affect the service life of a WD red nas drive

 

[depasseg]

Just put another drive (SSD perhaps) in your machine. Create a new pool with it and use that for your system dataset.