Constant Disk Writes

[Wasse]

I'm new to Freenas, so I've been doing a bunch of research, and have learned a lot from reading the forum. The one thing I can't figure out is why I keep getting constant writes to my drives every minute. I attached a screenshot to show you. I have no plugins installed, and I disabled CIFS shares, and the machine is still constantly writing to the drives. I have no clue what it's writing, or why.

The screenshot is after a reboot and leaving the machine 100% idle for a few hours. If it helps, I'm running a fresh install of 9.3, but I had this same experience on a fresh install of 9.2.1.9 as well.

Anybody have any ideas?

 

[Ericloewe]

.system dataset is being written to. This is expected behavior.

The only workaround is to put the .system dataset on a different pool, but it's frankly not worth it. Look at this as a way to keep the drives' load cycle counts low.

 

[Wasse]

That makes perfect sense, thank you :).

So as far as drive longevity, is writing to the drives constantly for years going to hurt them? Is it worth it to change the system dataset to a separate pool if I can squeeze some more life out of them? I've disabled load cycles on all my drives already with wdidle3 and have them set to never go into standby, if that makes a difference.

Also, being as I'm technical, but not to the point of reading Syslogs, would it be an ok idea to disable them all together? I realize if something weird happens, I won't be able to debug it... but if that happens, I don't think I'd be able to understand the syslog anyways, so maybe I should just disable them?

 

[Ericloewe]

Nah, mechanical drives don't wear out from writing. Don't bother changing syslog behavior, you'll regret it once something weird happens, and you gained nothing.

 

[ITGuy1024]

I noticed my one volume that I don't use has the same activity, this is normal write usage?

 

[Ericloewe]

Does it contain the .system dataset? If so, that's it.