FreeNAS Newish Build Disks Don't Idle

[BenAtNoFixedAbode]

I have recently finished a FreeNAS build for home use as follows

• Version: FreeNAS-11.3-U4.1
  
  
• Motherboard: ASUS A68HM-PLUS
• CPU: AMD A8-7650K with Radeon R7
• RAM: 8 GByte; but FreeNAS sees just under 7 GByte (presumably the built in graphics is grabbing some)
• RaidZ2 using
  • Western Digital 500 GByte WD5000AVCS
  • Western Digital 1 TByte WDC WD10EZEX
  • SAMSUNG 1 TByte HD103UJ
  • Seagate 500 GByte ST500DM002
• Boot-Pool: SanDisk Ultra Fit 16 GByte
• Hard disk controller: On-Board:
• SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
• NIC: On-Board: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 Gigabit Ethernet Controller

Note these are all 2nd hand or old parts that I had lying around apart from a couple of the disks.

It has been setup and running and is working as expected except that every few seconds the disk access light flashes, along with a sound typical of HDD access.

I did have it configured to spin down the disks but since that wasn't happening I reconfigured it not to do that so that I could monitor the disks instead and the Disk I/O graph is showing a fairly constant amount of writing with a peak every 5 minutes (attached).

The only thing permanently connected to the server is out Logitech Media Server running on a Raspberry PI to access music but it doesn't have write access and the FreeNAS server has been exhibiting this behaviour since before I connected it.


Is there a reason for this disk activity and is there something I can do to stop it?

Any help appreciated thank you

 

[Alecmascot]

That activity is from the System-Dataset.
You can change its location to the boot-pool but I would no do that or you will damage your boot device in short order.

System ~ System Dataset.

 

[Fredda]

RaidZ2 using

• Western Digital 500 GByte WD5000AVCS
• Western Digital 1 TByte WDC WD10EZEX
• SAMSUNG 1 TByte HD103UJ
• Seagate 500 GByte ST500DM002

If it is not too late, you could rethink you're pool layout. You could setup two mirrored pools with the same size HDD each.
You'll loose a little bit of redundancy in terms of disc failure but you're storage capability goes up to ~1.5TB from 1.0TB.
Also the spin down will work at least for 2 of your discs.

RAM: 8 GByte; but FreeNAS sees just under 7 GByte (presumably the built in graphics is grabbing some)

Try to set the RAM amount reserved for the GPU to the lowest possible value in BIOS/UEFI. FreeNAS does not need it.
The more RAM for FreeNAS the better.

 

[BenAtNoFixedAbode]

If it is not too late, you could rethink you're pool layout. You could setup two mirrored pools with the same size HDD each.
You'll loose a little bit of redundancy in terms of disc failure but you're storage capability goes up to ~1.5TB from 1.0TB.
Also the spin down will work at least for 2 of your discs.

Thank you for your reply

It is too late, but I did think long and hard before settling on that layout. The storage capacity I got was 862GiB which is up from the 730GiB I had previously (on a single disk in an old laptop (that crashed in March and started this whole let's build a NAS endeavour (I managed to recover about 90% of the disk contents and 100% of what we cared about at least in part due to having forgotten copies of the data else where (a less haphazard back-up scheme is also in order))).

Redundancy is much more important to me than capacity (or performance) if I need more capacity I can swap out the disks for larger ones and in fact I am assuming that I will have to rotate the disks as they wear out and again I will replace them with whatever is the current cheap disk (that's 1TByte at the moment). The WD 1Tbyte drive is new, the Samsung 1TByte drive isn't new but hadn't been used before (do HDD wear out just from sitting in a cupboard?) but the 500GByte drives are used (about 3 years) so I am assuming they will fail first (although that is of course very much over simplifying the way drive wear occurs).

Try to set the RAM amount reserved for the GPU to the lowest possible value in BIOS/UEFI. FreeNAS does not need it.
The more RAM for FreeNAS the better.

I think I did check that but I may do it again because FreeNAS is only reporting 6.9GiB available. It seems to be running ok for now (idling with some 1.5GiB free) and ram is towards the top of my upgrade list especially if there are performance problems.

 

[BenAtNoFixedAbode]

That activity is from the System-Dataset.
You can change its location to the boot-pool but I would no do that or you will damage your boot device in short order.

System ~ System Dataset.

Thank you for your reply.

That is what I thought and I did switch the system dataset to the boot-pool a few weeks ago but it had no effect on the HDD activity. I just wouldn't have expected the syslog to be written quite so often if the system is working properly since it mainly shows Initialisation and Error messages (based on my Linux experience I'm aware this is FreeBSD and may not be the same).

Also I would quite like to look at the syslog but when it was in my main pool I couldn't work out where to find it.

Finally for the purposes of organisation is it worth setting up a pool (a sub-pool of my main pool) to be the pool for the system dataset?

I take you point about damaging the boot device and I may switch it back once I've understood what's going on (or given up)