constant disk activity

[trsvank]

Hi,

I've created a 6 drive Raid Z2 pool with a L2ARC ssd. I've noticed that my drives are constantly writing with about 40kB/s which which is send by my switch. (When I disconnect the internet, this is still happening but when I disconnect the switch it stops.)

Additionally, once per minute this writing is doubled to 80kB/s and then it returns to 40kB/s.

I've already tried turning off all services in the gui and syslog with no result.

Is there a way to prevent this?

 

[Yatti420]

Well the freenas system constantly writes to the system dataset.. Maybe the switch is configured to ping the server for some reason.. Maybe look at the switch configuration if it's managed..

 

[trsvank]

Well, even when I changed the system dataset pool to another drive, every minute or so the data was still being written to my main pool. Is there a way to keep all this data on the freenas usb instead?

 

[Yatti420]

You can move the .system dataset and syslog off main pool to mirrored ssds etc.. That assumes that is what is writing all the time..

 

[cyberjock]

I'm really not sure what you are upset about.. 80kB is a rounding error in the big scheme of things. It could be some computer that's mounted the drive checking to see if its still available.

 

[trsvank]

It's not about the space or bandwidth use. I was just wondering if this is normal behavior. It seems strange power consuming and not healthy for the drives to be constantly writing 24/7 compared to the possibility to put these logs in the RAM and send them to a separate usb drive once per day. I'm pretty new to this stuff so I know that I could be terribly wrong about this but I wanted to ask it anyways. :)

 

[cyberjock]

80kb in a minute is not 24x7 use. In fact, disks last longer when they are left powered on 24x7. They shouldn't necessarily be fully loaded 100% of the time either, but 80kb in a minute takes a fraction of a second to write. ;)

I wouldn't say it's abnormal or anything. If you were telling me it was 100MB every 10 seconds I'd tell you something is very wrong though. ;)

 

[trsvank]

It's constantly writing with 40kb/s and each minute there is a 80kb/s "spike"

Even with the system dataset on a separate thumb drive there are small writes to the main pool. This prevents disk spindown. I just find it a bit strange.

But if you say it's a non-issue I trust you and forget about it :)

Would you recommend keeping the sytem dataset on my main pool or use the thumb drive? (32GB sandisk)

 

[Knowltey]

Yes, I believe this is normal behaviour, mine does this as well.

Keep the system dataset on the pool.

 

[Whattteva]

I personally don't bother with disk spindown.
Quite frankly, I find it quite annoying to have to wait for spinup when I do use it.
Plus, I got the wd reds specifically for this 24/7 use case in the first place.