Checking for TLER, ERC, etc. support on a drive

Megan Q.

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Jul 26, 2016
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My Seagate 5TB ST5000DM000-1FK178 drive don't seem to support this though the SMART test results say it does. Who knows?

[root@freenas] ~# smartctl -l scterc /dev/ada1
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

SCT Error Recovery Control command not supported
 

LIGISTX

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Just an update to the used or new HGST dealio, well I popped one in, it had over 24,000 hours of on time. Thats a far cry from new.


Sent from my jailbroke iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Stux

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Just an update to the used or new HGST dealio, well I popped one in, it had over 24,000 hours of on time. Thats a far cry from new.


Sent from my jailbroke iPhone using Tapatalk

I'd return them and buy new drives personally.

Nearly 3 years old. And probably worked hard.
 

LIGISTX

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I'd return them and buy new drives personally.

Nearly 3 years old. And probably worked hard.

Yup, that's the plan.


Sent from my jailbroke iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Krzykat

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Thank You for this thread. I had an old Dell 1950 with 2" drive bays, so I bought what looked like my best option - 4 Seagate Constellation 7200 RPM hard drives from Amazon - Brand New. Since I've got a Perc controller, from BSD I couldn't get all my info on the drive, so because of this thread I decided to take the extra step and pop one in a windows computer and ran crystaldiskinfo and guess what ... over 27,000 hours on the drive and a bit over 3 years. Now I'm going to get Amazon to return these drives, buy a proper supermicro with 12 3.5" bays so that I can buy some NEW 4 GB reds and start having fun.
 

Spearfoot

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Thank You for this thread. I had an old Dell 1950 with 2" drive bays, so I bought what looked like my best option - 4 Seagate Constellation 7200 RPM hard drives from Amazon - Brand New. Since I've got a Perc controller, from BSD I couldn't get all my info on the drive, so because of this thread I decided to take the extra step and pop one in a windows computer and ran crystaldiskinfo and guess what ... over 27,000 hours on the drive and a bit over 3 years. Now I'm going to get Amazon to return these drives, buy a proper supermicro with 12 3.5" bays so that I can buy some NEW 4 GB reds and start having fun.
Yikes!
In general, when buying hard drives on Amazon or Newegg, make sure they are 'sold by and shipped' from Amazon or Newegg. Otherwise you're probably buying from some nefarious fly-by-night outfit selling used drives. The large on-line retailers really ought to vet their vendors better.
 

Kane Lee

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Nov 23, 2016
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WD 8.0 TB WD80EZZX (Pulled from a mybook - It is an HGST drive - 5400rpm He8??)
TLER can be enabled, but does not persist after shutdown

This post has a nice script for enabling TLER on all drives at boot:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-tler-is-always-enabled-on-your-drives.43494/

@PhilipS I am thinking of building a new machine using only WD80EZZXs on them. Can you please tell me what your experience has been with using those drives in your setup? Were you able to successfully activate TLER on the drives?
 

Kane Lee

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Sorry, nothin' yet. I've got a client on fire and I've had to put all hardware playing on hold. :-/
@jgreco have you had a chance to play around with the WD80EZZX drives over as of yet? i am thinking of building a new machine using these drives but want to make sure that they are "jgreco approved" ;) thanks!
 

PhilipS

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May 10, 2016
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@PhilipS I am thinking of building a new machine using only WD80EZZXs on them. Can you please tell me what your experience has been with using those drives in your setup? Were you able to successfully activate TLER on the drives?

I'm using two of them in a mirror in a Dell T20. They run hot in the Dell case (upper 40s during load, but this is cooler than they ran in the WD enclosure). I haven't had any issues with them. TLER can be enabled, but they will lose the setting when restarted. No way to know if the setting really "takes". Not a big deal for me, if they start acting up where TLER is needed, then the drive will be replaced.

Only nitpick I have with them is the seek noise is louder than other drives I have used, but the Dell case may be contributing to this, as I don't remember hearing the seek noise in the external enclosure.
 

Kane Lee

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@PhilipS thank you for your response. do you know how to activate TLER on these drives?
 

PhilipS

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ewhac

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Okay, so, once we've established a drive supports SCTERC/TLER...

What's a good value to set it to for FreeNAS?
 

Spearfoot

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NASbox

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For what it's worth (if anybody cares)
Hitachi HDS724040ALE640

SCT Error Recovery Control:
Read: Disabled
Write: Disabled

I don't know if it is possible to enable it, or if this just means that it isn't supported.
 

mattlach

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For the record, all of my old 4TB WD RED's (WD40EFRX) come default with it enabled and set to 7s.

I'm in the process of swapping in some 10TB Seagate Enterprise v6 drives (ST10000NM0016) and they come default with it enabled, and set to 10s.

Which raises the question. If you are lucky enough to have a settable drive, and can choose any time your heart desires, what would be the ideal time for a ZFS filer?
 

rlaggren

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Nov 13, 2016
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I hope it's proper to add onto an existing thread carrying the correct topic. If not I will be happy to open a new thread.

I have a peculiar issue with an (about) 4yr old WD drive, although the drive functions fine. I have two more of the same type in sealed foil that I'm considering putting into a software RAID, so I started by running some inquiries against the operating drive.

Smartctl and hdparm appear to list SCT as supported/enabled, but "smartctl -l scterc" says "commmand not supported". Say what? Below is the confusing output.

Code:
pink-office:/ # smartctl --capabilities /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-4.4.92-18.36-default] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x05) Offline data collection activity
										was aborted by an interrupting command from host.
										Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status:	  (   0) The previous self-test routine completed
										without error or no self-test has ever
										been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection:				(12360) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:					(0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
										Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
										Suspend Offline collection upon new
										command.
										Offline surface scan supported.
										Self-test supported.
										Conveyance Self-test supported.
										Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:			(0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
										power-saving mode.
										Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:		(0x01) Error logging supported.
										General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time:		(   2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:		( 145) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time:		(   5) minutes.
SCT capabilities:			  (0x3037) SCT Status supported.
										SCT Feature Control supported.
										SCT Data Table supported.




Code:
pink-office:/ # hdparm -I /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:

ATA device, with non-removable media
		Model Number:	   WDC WD6401AALS-00J7B0				  
		Serial Number:	  WD-WMATV7025413
		Firmware Revision:  05.00K05
		Transport:		  Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5
...
...
		  *	Software settings preservation
		   *	SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
		   *	SCT Read/Write Long (AC1), obsolete
		   *	SCT Write Same (AC2)
		   *	SCT Features Control (AC4)
		   *	SCT Data Tables (AC5)
				unknown 206[12] (vendor specific)
				unknown 206[13] (vendor specific)
...



Code:
pink-office:/ # smartctl -l scterc /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-4.4.92-18.36-default] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

SCT Error Recovery Control command not supported


Hoping for any thoughts about this seeming contradiction.

Thanks

Rufus
 

mattlach

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Oct 14, 2012
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Something that has been interesting to me is that my new Seagate 10TB Enterprise drives have come in sealed packages from the factory with a variety of default error recovery times. Most have been 6 seconds, but some have been 2 an d 10.

I confirmed they are new, by making sure Start_Stop_Count count in smart data is 1 on first boot and Power_On_Hours is 0, so I know no one has messed with them.

I'm guessing Seagate just doesn't have a standard specification for what the default setting is.

Either way, they are all at 2 seconds now, which seemed like a good compromise for ZFS, and it appears to be sticking, but this isn't unexpected on an enterprise drive.
 

mattlach

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Oct 14, 2012
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Either way, they are all at 2 seconds now, which seemed like a good compromise for ZFS, and it appears to be sticking, but this isn't unexpected on an enterprise drive.

Sadly, I have to report that all of my Seagate ST10000NM0016 Enterprise Drives reset to their default values once power cycled. They will have to be set with a script on every boot.

Kind of disappointing Seagate.
 

jbernie51

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Jul 3, 2018
Messages
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@RoboKaren, the shell script (named set-hdd-tler.sh, see below) is in my 'Systems Administration' dataset located at /mnt/tank/sysadmin. You'll need to tweak the script to reflect the number of drives in your system and how FreeNAS assigns device names to them:

smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/da2
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/da3
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/da4
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/da5
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/da6
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/da7
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/da8

I set it up to run at boot-up as a 'postinit' script using the 'Init/Shutdown Scripts' selection under 'Tasks' on the FreeNAS top-level menu (click on thumbnail for details). Be sure to specify the correct path to your script.
View attachment 10790

I came across this and I'm trying to figure out how to make it work:
How do I access the dataset you specified? I used the 'Shell' to mkdir as you named it, but I can't create a file. I'm assuming that I'm going about this wrong.
 
Last edited:

Spearfoot

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I came across this and I'm trying to figure out how to make it work:
How do I access the dataset you specified? I used the 'Shell' to mkdir as you named it, but I can't create a file. I'm assuming that I'm going about this wrong.
@jbernie51 : this subject presupposes a great deal of knowledge on your part, e.g., setting up datasets, setting up shell access for logging on to the FreeNAS server, mastery of basic UNIX commands, writing shell scripts, etc. It sounds like you may not be familiar with some of these items, so you may have to do some studying to get going. That said...

You will need to remove the directory you created from the command line (/mnt/tank/sysadmin) -- we always use the FreeNAS GUI to create datasets, as this is how FreeNAS is designed to be used. I created my system admin dataset using the FreeNAS GUI under 'Storage' on the main menu. This is where you create datasets to be used as shares and so forth. On my system, I named my pool 'tank' and my system admin dataset 'sysadmin', but you can use any names that strike your fancy. FreeNAS always mounts your pool in the 'mnt' directory on the boot drive, so this is where the path /mnt/tank/sysadmin came from in my earlier post. Again, your system may differ from mine, depending on your pool name and so forth.

Once your dataset is configured, you can log on the FreeNAS server with a shell session and create your script. Many folks use a Windows program called PuTTY for this purpose, but there are numerous ways of establishing a shell session with your FreeNAS server. You will want to execute the smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/??? command on each of the drives for which you wish to specify a TLER/ERC value. To get a list of the drives on your system, you can run smartctl --scan. Your drive list will almost certainly differ from mine, which is why I used the ??? earlier.

Once you've created your script, use the FreeNAS GUI to have it execute at system startup. This will be from the 'Init/Shutdown Scripts' tab under 'Tasks' on the main menu. Here you will add a new item of type 'script', specifying 'post init' in the 'when' field and providing the scripts full path.

Hope this is enough information to get you started. Good luck!
 
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