For chassis with larger numbers of drives, or when connecting external JBOD chassis, it is common for the drives to connect to a specialized board that provides power and routing for the SATA/SAS signals to the controller. When building a storage system, there are many different ways the disks might be connected to the system. NVME-oF allows storage devices and arrays in remote chassis to be connected to local motherboards. NVMe storage comes in many form factors, from small M.2 devices to U.2 and other hot-swappable formats intended for servers. NVMe connects storage devices directly to the PCIe bus, offering extremely low latency and high throughput.
- After you apply these settings the logs will be written to your SSD instead of being flushed to the disc array.
- To prevent parking more often that is useful (for a server, usually that choice would be “very rarely”), there are a couple ways to do it and which apply will depend on what the hard drive vendor’s firmware supports.
- To do this, both devices must have the program installed and must allow access through the use of security keys.
- Experienced enterprise storage managers also keep extensive notes including the model number, SKU and/or URL for reordering, purchase order information, warranty end date, warranty URL, and any other useful information about each drive.
- Typical SAS connectors support up to 4 drives per “lane”, but with an expander up to 255 devices are possible.
- In this case, there are at least two disks that I probably need to configure, since /dev/sde seems to be parking as often as about every 4 minutes (0.004 Hz) and /dev/sdc is only parking slightly less often.
StarDesk – Remote Desktop & Gaming
If your system has multipath SAS, each disk will be present more than once, and you should use the gmultipathcommand to deduplicate your disks and for labeling as well. FreeBSD supports a number of different ways to label the disk, depending on your use case. The map command displays all of the SES devices and each element (this is the nomenclature in SES) connected to them. Of course, all of this chassis management technology isn’t very effective without tools to make it usable. It also provides information about each slot in the enclosure (even if empty), including a flag to indicate if the device has recently been swapped.
Unfortunately, APM settings don’t persist between power cycles so if we wanted to change disk settings with APM they would need to be reapplied on every boot. Advanced power management levels80h and higher do not permit the device to spin down to save power. For example, a device may implement one power management method from 80h to A0h and a higherperformance, higher power consumption method from level A1h to FEh. To prevent parking more often that is useful (for a server, usually that choice would be “very rarely”), there are a couple ways to do it and which apply will depend on what the hard drive vendor’s firmware supports. With the SMART metrics captured by Prometheus, it’s fairly easy to write a query that will show how often a given disk is parking its heads. Since I use Prometheus to capture information on the server’s operation however, I can use that to monitor that my hard drives are doing well.
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My question is – is there a way to tell if a certain disk suffers from the issue prior to purchasing? For the system I’m monitoring here, the SSD that it boots from has a wearout indicator sitting on 95 of 100 (only 5% of the rated life consumed), visibly unchanged for a long time so it’s not very interesting as an example. (The properties like ID_SERIAL_SHORT can be queried on a running system using udevadm info, such as udevadm info /dev/sdd to get the properties of the disk currently assigned ID sdd.) Somewhat more useful for monitoring is the smartmon_load_cycle_count_raw_value, which provides the actual number of load cycles that have been done. Secondly what are your disk monitoring refresh intervals and what do you use on your system to monitor SMART disk health?
SAS disk reservations provide the ability to connect to the disk redundantly—or even across multiple machines—while ensuring it is only used by one of them at a time. SAS provides many more features than SATA does—including full duplex operations, advanced error recovery, multipath, and disk reservations. It too was an extension on an existing interface bus which offered greatly improved performance. SATA+AHCI improved data transfer speeds, simplicity of communication, and included abilities that we today take for granted, such as “hot swap” and command queueing. These concepts also apply to other operating systems, but the tools might differ slightly.
Whether you are a computer technician in charge of technical support or a student who needs to work together with their classmates, AnyDesk is the program you are looking for. Then, click on “Connect” to access the other device. Send it to the other user who has the program and they will be able to access and control your device. It is very popular among professionals who provide technical support. Remember, the key is to act quickly and use the right tools for your specific situation. These practices and tools should give you a solid starting point for recovering your deleted files.
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When it comes to long-term data storage, there are several strategies and media types that Redditors recommend. It refreshes the disks SMART information every 5 min. ZFS and Btrfs both aim to modernize storage by combining filesystems and volume management, but… Monitoring and maintaining your storage media is one of the most important parts of keeping your data safe.
It’s hard to imagine why your drives are that loud! It’s a datacenter drive, very loud, so it’s still audible. For quietness, a noise reducing case, move it somewhere else, quieter drives, maybe SSD instead of hard drives, etc.
- For the system I’m monitoring here, the SSD that it boots from has a wearout indicator sitting on 95 of 100 (only 5% of the rated life consumed), visibly unchanged for a long time so it’s not very interesting as an example.
- It is fairly well-known among techies that hard drives used in server-like workloads can suffer from poor configuration by default such that they frequently load and unload their heads, which can cause disks to fail much faster than they otherwise would.
- If you’d feel safer with a team of experts monitoring your storage, consider a ZFS Support Subscription.
- The other slight annoyance when setting the idle3 timer on WD drives is that changes only take effect when the drive is powered on, usually meaning the host computer must be fully shut down and started back up for any changes to be seen- this makes experimentation to determine how raw timer values are interpreted a slower and more tedious process.
- SATA disks plugged directly into the motherboard use an interface called AHCI which does not provide much in the way of advanced management features.
- Sesutil can also be used to locate the disk in the physical array.While the SES data tells us that there is an 8 TB disk in Slot 06, it does not tell us which slot in the chassis corresponds to 06.
Preventing excessive parking
FreeBSD’s sesutil is a tool reveryplay to interface with the SES devices on your system. You should also configure smartd to monitor your disks and send you alerts, which may give you advanced notice when a drive is starting to fail. These special boards, called SAS Expanders, reduce the total cabling required to provide power and signal pathways to all connected disks.
However, I noticed that my HDD’s heads park (particulary Seagate Exos) every 3 minutes. ZFS is widely trusted for large-scale storage, but production environments expose design mistakes,… When dealing with critical data, you only get one chance to do it right. The status field is a bitmask supporting a number of different options, but the main ones we care about are 1 (OK), and 2 (FAULTED). When combined with a JSON parser like jq, this can be used to automate tasks for each disk.
Alternatives to AnyDesk
Sounds like the drives being woken for the ZIL to flush writes to the ZFS pool and then going back to idle/sleep every 5 seconds. Enable the checkmark for the Syslog and choose a pool that is not based on hard drives. I had this same problem, using HGST data center refurb drives.
While I have been aware of this in my home server as well, it is easy to forget to ensure that disks are not silently killing themselves by cycling the heads. With modern, especially Enterprise grade hard drives being able to have hundreds of thousands of head park operations in their service life, is this really an isssue? With the tools presented here, the reader is well armed to react to failed disks and ensure that the wrong disk isn’t accidentally pulled. However, if a disk has died entirely, or a slot is empty, it might not have a device name. Sesutil can also be used to locate the disk in the physical array.While the SES data tells us that there is an 8 TB disk in Slot 06, it does not tell us which slot in the chassis corresponds to 06. Looking at a few items from the output, we can see the device names (/dev/da0 and /dev/da7 respectively) of the disks in Slot00 and Slot07.
I agree to receive your newsletters and accept the data privacy statement. Ensure device health & easy replacements with these valuable tips. Discover strategies to manage disk arrays on FreeBSD and related platforms/operating systems. Simply installing the apps and choosing a pool for k3s and docker creates a dataset and logs. Your pool gets writes from somewhere and ZFS is writing those to disk every 5 seconds.
