Burn in using badblocks and HDD temperatures...

[zeebee]

After much awesome advice on these forums, my first build is finally underway. Following the various build/burn-in guides, I ran memtest for a couple of days, and then started running running badblocks on each of my 5 drives simultaneously (using tmux).

badblocks -wsv -b 4096 -c 256 /dev/da0

They've been running for about 50 hours now, and I was just wondering if anyone can tell me whether badblocks pushes the HDDs to their 'maximum workload', or whether this is a relatively light workload for the drives?

I was hoping this represents a 'worst case' for my drives, so I could be confident that my HDD temperatures were going to be ok.

Using one of the scripts I found here, my temps are reported as this:

I imagine badblocks doesn't use the CPU a whole lot, so it will add some heat to the system... but do these HDD temperatures represent anything near a worst case for me?

Thanks for any insights!

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

They've been running for about 50 hours now, and I was just wondering if anyone can tell me whether badblocks pushes the HDDs to their 'maximum workload', or whether this is a relatively light workload for the drives?

badblocks definitely stresses the drives, that is half the point. Most often real workloads don't have your drives reading/writing constantly for so long.

I was hoping this represents a 'worst case' for my drives, so I could be confident that my HDD temperatures were going to be ok.

32C isn't actually that horrible IMO.

I imagine badblocks doesn't use the CPU a whole lot, so it will add some heat to the system... but do these HDD temperatures represent anything near a worst case for me?

Most likely. What chassis are these drives in and what is the cooling system?

 

[zeebee]

badblocks definitely stresses the drives, that is half the point. Most often real workloads don't have your drives reading/writing constantly for so long.

Excellent, thanks for confirming that.

32C isn't actually that horrible IMO.

Yeah, I've read they should be between 30 and 40, so it seemed quite promising if this is even close to worst case.

Most likely. What chassis are these drives in and what is the cooling system?

They're in a Fractal Design Define R6, with 2 stock case fans at the front near the drives, a Noctua NH-D9L CPU fan, and then another stock case fan at the back. I've positioned the HDDs so they have an empty bay between each of them, which I thought might help with the air flow, but couldn't be sure. HDD da0 is at the bottom, and tends to be a degree or two hotter than the rest - I think this is because it's just below the lower fan.

I thought I might need to replace the case fans with something better, but it seems like it might be ok - super quiet too, can't really hear anything when the sides are on.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

They're in a Fractal Design Define R6, with 2 stock case fans at the front near the drives, a Noctua NH-D9L CPU fan, and then another stock case fan at the back. I've positioned the HDDs so they have an empty bay between each of them, which I thought might help with the air flow, but couldn't be sure. HDD da0 is at the bottom, and tends to be a degree or two hotter than the rest - I think this is because it's just below the lower fan.

Check out this link for my old R6 build. I kept it full of fans and 12 HDDs and it managed to keep things cool.

 

[zeebee]

I'd actually read your build post about a month ago while learning about FreeNAS - 12 HDDS in this case is pretty impressive! Thanks for the write up and your help.

Since I only had the four fans (3 case, 1 cpu), I connected them directly to the motherboard. However, the case fans are only 3 pin, so from what I understand they can't be controlled by the motherboard at all - just their speed reported?

The Notua CPU fan is 4 pin and connected to FAN1 on the mobo. If I understand correctly, its speed is controlled by some part of the motherboard (not sure if this is by the BMC or something else?). It runs quite slowly when the CPU is idle (which I believe is correct) but the BMC flags it as an alert, and sends me an email every time it changes.

I haven't had time to look at this yet, but a quick google makes me think this is a pretty common problem, and apparently it can be adjusted somehow using impitool?

I'm also wondering why the three case fans seem to run at different speeds - I would have thought they'd be the same?

Edit: Found the resource here and adjusted the thresholds on my Noctua fan using this command:

ipmitool sensor thresh FAN1 lower 100 200 300