IMO getting rid of the pendings isn’t the goal; their presence is an alert that there is an issue on certain sectors. With that info a home user can decide on if they want to replace asap/monitor/whatever their risk tolerance & budget allows.
A proper datacenter would not care; they’d wait for drive to either die or until it degrades pool performance & then swap with one of the many spares on hand.
The failed smart tests did trigger the alerts regarding unreadable (pending) sectors - it was just that I didn’t realise it was triggered by the smart tests. I mistakenly expected a failed smart test to give an alert stating the smart tests had failed not in the roundabout way it did this. That coupled with me thinking the ZFS health was an indication of the drive help just exacerbated my confusion.
I decided to try truenas after seeing many youtube videos extolling how good it was and to be fair, even a know nothing noob such as I am didn’t find it too difficult getting it up and running. I still struggle with installing apps as I don’t really uncerstand most of the contents of the config pages but managed to get plex & handbrake up and running.
The only other issue I’ve had was an ethernet port keep causing the system to restart but agin, with the help of the forum I learned that some (if not all) Realtek chipsets don’t get on with truenas and it was swapped out for a card with an intel chipset (matching the onboard ethernet). For the best part, my experience with truenas has been smooth sailing. The system just gets on and does what it’s supposed to do. The two issues have both been hardware. I’m not the ‘adventurous’ type with anything built on Linux and when I read posts with things concerning Docker, Kerberos, proxmox, VM’s etc, it just goes way over my head. I totally get the purpose of Docker & VM’s it’s just that I struggle getting them to work. Proxmox and kerberos are an alien language to me.
@bacon
I would not have jumped into the thread however I saw what I consider incorrect advice to a new person to TrueNAS, and in this case Linux as well. I do think you meant well and you did provide your personal experience, and that is good. But it is a new user who doesn’t know Linux, or TrueNAS. That person is possibly going to take that advice and run with it, then ignoring a serious alarm indication. Will it always be a serious problem? Of course not, however make an educated decision based on all the SMART data first.
Before you disagree with me, realize that I am perfectly fine if we disagree. I’m not here to “stir the pot”, I’m just not that kind of person these days.
You are not alone in some of these experiences, but the data is easily digested and you can figure out what it really means, if you have collected all the SMART data. Using all the SMART data, it says the drive has failed. In my opinion it should be replaced and RMA if under warranty. And I’d want to lay out the options and rationale behind the options.
But here is the answer you might like to read. It tells you why ID 197/198 may be valuable.
If you have questions about drives and SMART data in the future, please ask me. I may not know the answer and I will say that, but I may know the answer and I will provide an answer and if I can easily provide references, I will do that as well. The more of us out there educated on this hardware, then better we can help each other.
Yup, that would have been nice but TrueNAS does not do that, unfortunately.
However, and I’m not trying to peddle this to you and you may have a difficult time making it run, but Multi-Report (in the Resources section) is a script I maintain. It can run SMART tests for you and provides a daily email complete with charts and data. The most important part would probably be the Email Subject Line. By default is ends in “As is Good”, “Warning”, or “Critical”. This is a summary indication of all your drives. All the details are in the email body. This script also does several other things but this is the main thing. If you are able to install the script and run as ‘root’, then you can have this helping you. Many people use it. And I don’t know everything about drives, but I learn more all the time.
Yesterday I would have said that I can’t get email from the server working BUT I did some searching and found a thread on the old depracated forum that helped me work through that. The thread explained how to set an app password but since 2016 when the thread was posted, google have changed the pages and I had to search for the term ‘App Password’ to find it. After getting the password I successfully setup email and got a test mail from Truenas.
I’ll look into that script, I have a vague memory of trying to set it up when I first gotTruenas up & running but giving up when I couldn’t get the email working.
This thread seems to have inadvertently allowed me to learn how to fix another thing.
Thanks to all who contributed. who knows one day maybe I’ll be able to assist others,
