Storage Drive Activity after Loading 10 TB

DeterH

Cadet
Joined
Apr 1, 2016
Messages
9
Hello all, could use a little help with this one. I recently replaced all HDDs with 5 WD Red 8TB drives to increase the pool size. Following that, I reinstalled the latest version of FreeNAS and configured single RaidZ1 pool that I then loaded with about 10 TB data and then set up 3 SMB shares. What I'm noticing now is that the drives seem to be chugging along (audible) for at least 3 days.

Does anyone know what is going on in the background or how I can establish what is happening? Hope this is not a stupid question......
 

Alecmascot

Guru
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Mar 18, 2014
Messages
1,175
Exactly which drives have you installed ?
 

DeterH

Cadet
Joined
Apr 1, 2016
Messages
9
Exactly which drives have you installed ?
Thank you for the response. I do need to solve this because the drives are continuing to growl away at what seems like 24/7 so far. I installed 5 ea Western Digital Red 8 TB drives with a 4/2020 manufacturing date. Help would be very much appreciated. I'm definitely not an expert on the FreeNAS system.
 

Samuel Tai

Never underestimate your own stupidity
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Apr 24, 2020
Messages
5,398
Actually, could you provide the model numbers? What @Alecmascot is getting at is your drives could be shingled magnetic recording (SMR), in which case, the drives could be repositioning data off their small regular recording zone during their idle periods.

If they are indeed Red 8 TBs (model WD80EFAX), then these are conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, and you're probably seeing ZFS do its thing. For the 3 SMB shares, there's updates of file access times. For ZFS, there's checksum verification and maintenance. As you did a recent upload of a large amount of data, ZFS is also rebalancing file system trees.
 

DeterH

Cadet
Joined
Apr 1, 2016
Messages
9
Actually, could you provide the model numbers? What @Alecmascot is getting at is your drives could be shingled magnetic recording (SMR), in which case, the drives could be repositioning data off their small regular recording zone during their idle periods.

If they are indeed Red 8 TBs (model WD80EFAX), then these are conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, and you're probably seeing ZFS do its thing. For the 3 SMB shares, there's updates of file access times. For ZFS, there's checksum verification and maintenance. As you did a recent upload of a large amount of data, ZFS is also rebalancing file system trees.
Thank you Samuel. I believe you are right and you have settled my mind about this issue. The drives are indeed CMRs - that's why (after learning that my WD Red 6 TB drives were SMR technology and a drive failure occured while loading data) I made the drive replacement in the first place . So, .... final analysis: All is well. Thanks again.
 
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