I have this issue that was driving me a bit insane for many months now. Enough to have me install Xpenology on my machine to get rid of it. I have two Segate Exos drives and they keep making this annoying noise, in unison every 3 seconds.
I always thought this was due to the system logs, or the apps, or something else flushing to the drive, and couldn’t rid rid of it, but now, I’ve finally figured out the noise stops when the disks spin. I got there by accident when I tried to run a SMART Long test, and during more than 1 day, the noise stopped.
Anyway, so I tried to mess with the options for disk Power Management, and to my surprise, they don’t do anything. I can put whatever I want in “Advanced Power Management”, and the disks continue doing the same.
Is this a bug on Truenas? Is there any work around to keep my drives from spinning down? (I’m pretty sure this also is ruining the drives, spinning down every 3 seconds).
Hi, thank you for your answer.
I’ running latest version Dragonfish, but like I said this happened since a long time ago as well. About 1 year ago when I last tried TrueNAS.
And yes, I also have tried both Advanced Power Management disabled, 128, 254… and well, everything in there actually.
Also, this happens from the get go, I tried re-installing TrueNAS fresh, and the result is exactly the same.
It’s those Seagate Enterprise 12TB (which are actually Seagate Exos according to the output).
But like I said, this only happens on TrueNAS, I can get this to stop is installing other OSes. So, it’s something TrueNAS is trying here I can’t identify.
This does not look like a drive that’s spinning up and down every 3 seconds though.
Maybe it’s not spinning, but the heads, in unison, make this seek noise every 3 seconds.
Where is you system’s dataset?
It’s in another drive, an NVME. I already tried the usual culprits for these cases. Change the dataset to an NVME, change the Apps dataset to an NVME. I even tried to change the zfs_txg_timeout to see if it did anything. The noise remains exactly the same unless the drive is fully spinning (doing a SMART test, for instance).
Agreed.
Not having heard Exos’ I am not familiar with with what they can sound like.
Something else is making the sound.
For a while I was thinking you may have SAS drives doing background medium scans. On repurposed enterprise drives those are often set to start automatically whenever the drive is otherwise idle.
But you Exos’ are SATA and do not appear to support that type of background scan.
Well, I’ve just found out something that might be pertinent:
hdparm reports that APM is not supported. While this is very strange, it explains why changing the APM for the drives from the TrueNAS GUI didn’t do anything.
Could you elaborate on why?
None of the Idle settings trigger at the frequency described by the OP.
The shortest Idle mentioned in that reddit is 2 minutes.
This is some interesting info, but unfortunately, it didn’t fix the issue.
Issuing a spin down with this utility does stop the noise. So at least that clears out that it’s not TrueNAS writing something to the disks that causes the noise.
Nothing happening there (it’s the mainPool where those disks are).
But as you can see on my answer right before this one, I successfully managed to spindown the disks and they kept spun down. So, TrueNAS is not trying to write anything there.
