What is accessing the disks?

[toolforger]

Hi all,

I have a FreeNAS box up and running, but not in use yet.
There are no background jobs except the nightly scrub.

Yet I hear regular disk activity. A typical pattern would be a two-step seek, followed by a short burst of seek activity, every three seconds or so.
It is definitely the data disks, because the OS is running off a USB stick.

How do I find out what is responsible for the disk accesses?
I have some pretty solid Linux experience and know atop, /var/log, and friends, but I am unsure where to look first on a BSD box.
Command line is fine.

Any hints and advice appreciated!

 

[Chris Moore]

You should not be doing a scrub nightly. That should be something that happens once a month.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[nojohnny101]

Where is your system dataset being stored? In the GUI, check "System" -> "System Datset" -> "System Dataset Pool"

What is that set to?

 

[RegularJoe]

If you can scrub all your pool in an hour or so would that still be bad to run it every night?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Not bad but way Overkill. Monthly is fine and at most every 2 weeks.

 

[nojohnny101]

If you can scrub all your pool in an hour or so would that still be bad to run it every night?

The main point here is that a scrub is taxing on the drives and there is no reason to unnecessarily tax your drives more frequently than necessary.

Now that part of "more frequently than necessary" is a matter of opinion. SMART tests are not taxing on the drives and detect errors that happen more often then the type of errors that would be detected by a scrub.

My schedule is:
- SMART short test every 3 days
- SMART long test twice per month
- scrub twice per month