What to do after install?

[Zorin1]

I got my FreeNas installed and all my file copied over to the server. What is next to do in terms of maintenance?

I was reading about a SMART tasks and I have a few questions about that:
1) Do you have to create a task for each hard drive? I noticed that I could select all the drive. If so, how do you know when one task is done and to start the other.
2) It looks like in the Task Schedule (cron) that you can only do it on the hour, there is no way to add mins like if you wanted it to run at 1:30 am.

From what I read SCRUBS should not happen at the same time as the SMART.

I have one other question that I am concerned about. When my FreeNas server is idle (meaning no on is reading or writing files to it), the drives make a weird noise. It should like a drive seeks to the end of the drive and make a noise. This happens on a repeatable time cycle. I would say less then a min apart. Is this something to be worried about? Where would I go to look if there are drive issues? The volume manager tells me that it is Healthy.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

1. You can make one task with multiple drives. The drives run the tests asynchronously, so you don't have to think about one finishing before another starts.
2. Yes, the task scheduler for SMART tests doesn't have a minutes selector.

The periodic disk activity you describe sounds normal to me. There are various logging activities running continuously.

What is next to do in terms of maintenance?

Make sure you have email notifications working correctly, so the system can inform you if it detects a problem.

 

[danb35]

Make sure you have email notifications working correctly,

...and make sure you have them set correctly for both the system in general, and for SMART--they're different configurations.

 

[Zorin1]

I played around last night doing a manual SMART long and short test. I did not know that the long test would be so long, ran over an hour and was only at 60%. I have a WD RED 4 TB drive. Not sure if that is normal or not. I then just did a short test on the other drives which ran in about 2 mins and did not find any problems. I learned a lot about the smartctl (I think that is what it was called) and all the command line stuff. Used egrep at the end of some of the command to get the info that I wanted to see. A little trick that I learned is with egrep you can put a -A1 and it will display the line your grep plus the line after it. Which worked well for getting some of the information that is on the second line most the line that gives you the status of the running test.

Now that I got some answers then I will schedule the SMART long and short test. Not sure what interval to use yet. I don't think that I need to do a long test more than once a month, thinking of doing the short test once a week.

 

[rsquared]

60% complete after an hour? I could have sworn it's a 5 hour run on my 3 TB WD reds. A short test in the 2-5 minute range is typical.

Your proposed schedule is about the minimum recommended. I'm running the long test twice a month (1st and 3rd Sunday) and some people like to run it as often as weekly.

 

[danb35]

Ditto @rsquared--expect several hours for a long test to complete. Also agree that your proposed schedule is about the minimum recommended. I'm probably on the other end of the recommended spectrum--I run short tests daily and long weekly. Scrub every two weeks.

 

[Zorin1]

The thing for me is that I don't write much data to my NAS. The data just sits there until I want to copy a mp3 to my computer to listen too or watch a movie. I understand if this was being uses other then for personal use that I might want to run Scrub and the SMART test more often.

 

[SweetAndLow]

The amount you use the nas doesn't really affect how often you run a scrub or smart test. If it sits static more then running scrubs is even more important. Stick with the standard interval suggested on the forums. I'm on my phone so I can't find you the thread right now.

 

[Glorious1]

You can make one task with multiple drives. The drives run the tests asynchronously, so you don't have to think about one finishing before another starts.

I'm not sure what you mean by "asynchronously", but when I run SMART tasks on all the drives with one task, all the drives get tested simultaneously.

 

[Bidule0hm]

In a general way asynchronously means you don't need to wait for a thing to finish to be able to launch another thing (the thing being the test here) ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm not sure what you mean by "asynchronously", but when I run SMART tasks on all the drives with one task, all the drives get tested simultaneously.

I believe the idea here was you can setup to run a SMART test on all the drives at the same time, not the idea that you can start a SMART long test at say 1AM and then schedule a SMART short test at 2AM and they would be fine because I don't believe that would be the case. I schedule a SMART short test every day of the week at 1AM and that test takes about 2 minutes to complete. I then have another schedule to run SMART long test at 1:15AM only on Sunday, lots of time between the two events. This schedule planning allows the two testing to interfere on Sunday. I'm fairly certain that if I started a Long test and then commanded a Short test, the Long test would abort in favor of the new test, but to be honest, I haven't done that kind of testing in a few years, at that time I knew a lot about this stuff.

 

[Zorin1]

I ended up doing this:
SCRUBS: 1st and 15th of the month at 4am. Theshold is set to 10 days.

SHORT SMART TEST: Every 5th, 12th, 19, and 26th of the month at 3am.

LONG SMART TEST: Every 8th and 22nd at 4am.

I got this from
cyberjock, Apr 10, 2014
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/scrub-and-smart-testing-schedules.20108/

Is there anything else that I should do to monitor the system?

 

[joeschmuck]

I don't agree with that posting by @cyberjock but it isn't the first nor will it be the last that we don't agree. Here's where... By design the SMART built into a drive is only estimated to provide a warning hopefully 24 hours prior to a fatal hardware failure. Running frequent SMART Short and Long tests is expected to bring potential issues to light before they become serious. Running a Short test verifies the drive electrically and mechanically, to a point. The Short test only checks a few spots on the drive platter surface whereas the Long test scans the entire surface. Myself and many others prefer to run Short tests daily in an effort to be notified sooner than later. Four times a month is not enough in my opinion. The Long tests are up to you when you run those. I prefer weekly, every two weeks is fine too. I say that because when you are running daily SMART Short tests, if your drive encountered an issue while your drive was reading or writing data since the last SMART test, well that will show up, even if it's not in the Short scanned are. Hope I didn't loose you.

What kind of pool do you have? RAIDZ2 or better I hope.

Also, I didn't see you state that you have your email account setup and working. All the SMART testing in the world will not help you if you can't get an email stating you have an issue.

Good Luck and I hope you enjoy your FreeNAS experience.

 

[Zorin1]

I have my four 4TB drive in a RAIDZ1. So I can lose one drive. I am using my Nas as more of a backup then a file server. I have copies on data that is on the NAS on different machines and it is not my single source. If I were to lose the Nas, then I will have all my important data.

I see your point about running the SMART short test everyday. Kind of makes sense to know as soon as possible when you have an issue. I'll have to go back and look at how to set it up to run daily.

I guess my next thing to look into is how to back up the Nas. Right now it is not an issue for me. But that might change in the future. Is there an easy way to hook up a USB 3.0 drive and back it up to that? Then I could just unplug it and keep it safe. I don't add much data to my Nas just has movies and music and pictures.

 

[danb35]

I have my four 4TB drive in a RAIDZ1. So I can lose one drive.

...and then if you have a read error anywhere on the rebuild, you will lose data. How much will depend on where the read error(s) is(are). If you're OK with that, cool, but you need to be aware of it. That's why RAIDZ1 isn't recommended for larger drives, because the odds of a read error, at least per the manufacturer's specs, are so high.

 

[joeschmuck]

I too use my NAS as my backup for my data, all my original data is on other computer systems and the data on my NAS would only be used to restore a failed computer, with the exception of the few movies I have, those can go away if needed, I could rip those again if needed and they are mainly just kid movies for the grand kids to keep the DVDs safe.

As for hooking up a USB drive directly to the NAS, well there is a feature where you can hook up an external drive and automatically copy data off the drive to the NAS but not the opposite way. Your best bet is to hook the drive to another computer and perform backups of changed data only. I run Windoze 7 and I use SyncToy to make a routine backup of my selected files to a mapped drive on my windows system, which just happens to be a removable drive. There are other ways to do this as well, just search for this as it's been asked many time on this forum over the past year.

As for SMART, you can do some of your own research to investigate how SMART works, Google is your friend, but don't take one persons opinion as fact, that includes mine too.