Discs randomly waking

[jersully]

In short, I can hear my discs spinning up every 5-10 minutes when the NAS shouldn't be doing anything. Powerd is running. SMART is set for a 30 minute interval but not if they're in Sleep, Standy, or Idle. This is for home use.

MiniDLNA is the only plugin. There are a couple of SAMBA shares but no computers are mapped to them yet. It has a RAID-Z2 sett. Hardware is a Dell Inspiron 570 with an Athlon II X2 240, 4x 2TB Seagate Baracuda drives, starTech PEXSAT34 SATA III controller, and an Intel PCIx Gb NIC.

I don't see anything useful in /var/log/messages. I've used various Unix/Linux/FreeBSD boxes in the past but I'm far from an expert. I'm a Windows SysAdmin of 20 years that has dabbled in other OS's and systems.

Need advice on where to look next. My concern here is HDD wear and tear and power utilizatioin.

 

[Stephens]

The conventional wisdom is if you leave the drives running, it'll actually be less wear and tear than spinning them down. I've also run into issues using 8.0.4 trying to spin down disks and also configure SMART checking not to spin them up. Honestly, I haven't spent time diagnosing it as the simple solution for me is to leave the disks spinning or disable 30 minute smart checks. But when I had the SMART checking enabled, I did notice my UPS reported more power pull than if I disabled SMART checking (and thus allowed the drives to spin down). Which version of FreeNAS are you running? It's also possible that even though you tell smartctl not to wake the drive if it's sleep, it does anyway. You could disable FreeNAS smart checking and go to the shell. Then wait for the drives to spin down. Then execute the smartctl command yourself and see if it respects, "Don't spin up to check." I was going to play around with stuff like this, but it's not a high priority for me.

 

[jersully]

No, it's not all that important. It has just been bothering me to hear those drives spin up while I'm lying in bed and the server shouldn't be doing anything. After posting I installed Transmission which makes the matter moot. Thanks for your post.