HDDs are all the time active

TrueNAS General
1

Hello everyone,

Before I start, I should say that I have read almost all related topics and tried couple of recommended solutions but I could not find a solution which can help me with my issue.

I am on the latest stable version of SCALE and I have just installed it. I have 5x 4TB drives which I created my pool with and I have a SSD which I installed my TrueNAS on.

After the installation, when I turn on my NAS, all the hard drives start to spin and they never stop. I have a Synology NAS which does not have a similar behavior. For obvious reasons I decided to switch to TrueNAS but this issue is a serious problem for me as I am afraid that my drives soon will be faulty.

And finally, I made sure that my boot-pool is not installed on the mechanical drives.

Any help would be appreciated.

1 Like
2

always on with no standby is just the default, you have to go and manually change each disk to make them use any power saving modes or go into standby ever

1 Like
3

Been a user of this software since FreeNAS 9.x and the server’s hard disks have always been active all the time. 24x WD Greens/Reds in the FreeNAS days and 12x Seagate X18 Exos drives in the TrueNAS days.

I have literally never had a hard disk drive fail in a FreeNAS/TrueNAS server. And yes, they get thrashed 24/7.

Good luck with unRAID and see you in about six months.

1 Like
4

Hi MSS,

most if not all Hard Disk Drives are meant to be run 24 hours a day 7 days a week given sufficient cooling. Spinning constantly is not what kills disks, spinning up and down is what does it most of the time (apart from vibrations, heat and such).

If you are running NAS disks or Enterprise disks you don’t need to worry. If you are running consumer disks like a WD Blue, Seagate Barracuda or similar you also need not to worry but those are not necessarily meant to be run 24/7 or run side-by-side.

Speaking from experience in private and professional life I can tell you that you can and should leave your disks spinning. This is also why it is the default setting in TrueNAS. My oldest disk in use in a NAS is a 12 year old WD Red 3 TB which is still running with three of his friends in an old setup with no issues as well as some slightly younger consumer HDDs as well. I had older ones which are still fine and only got swapped for bigger ones not because they failed. Hope that helps.

2 Likes
5

Thanks for your reply, but I am not planning to go with unRaid!

1 Like
6

Thanks for your reply,

I am using WD red pro disks.

So if I put the disks on energy saving, would it effect the health of the disks ?

I also would like to set the disks to go in park mode if not used in 60 min.

7

They might not ever go idle as the system writes to them every so often, depending on where system dataset is stored and if there are VMs or Apps.

The System Dataset location can be found in System, Advanced Settings, Storage window. It is usually placed on the first pool created.

1 Like
8

Yes, as @ProfessionalAmateur mentioned, it can affect the health of the disks in a negative manner. I’m also using WD Red Pro drives and I let mine run 24/7.

9

Those Western Digital Greens (I flashed mine with the Red firmware) and the Reds were legendary. I think most of mine were shucked from Western Digital external drive enclosures and were 3TB and 4TB capacity. So reliable, even in a chassis which perhaps afforded slightly insufficient cooling.

I sold all of mine for a good price, even though they were probably 10 years old. I kinda regret it because I think they’d have been still functioning fine today.

Just let the disks spin 24/7. They’ll be fine. Temperature and vibration/shock control is more important. Good quality cables, power supplies and memory too.

10

Thanks everyone for the support!

This was the solution: They might not ever go idle as the system writes to them every so often, depending on where system dataset is stored and if there are VMs or Apps.

I changed my system dataset to ms SSD and the issue is resolved!