Is it The Click of Death?

TrueNAS General
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Hello all

I can hear, approx once or twice a minute, a single-click noise which I believe to be from one of my four RAIDZ2 HDDs.

It has either started recently (since the New Year) or it has been happening for a while longer. At the end of December I replaced my comparatively noisy PC which sits next to my TN box which may have been masking the sound.

All four drives are 1TB WDCs: three WD10EZEX and one WD10EZRX, all 7200 RPM, and always on

SMART test results, short and long, always all say OK. Multi_Report says their power on time varies from 25k-30k hours and Multi_Report shows them as all OK.

I remember the click of death from 20 years ago (Maxtors in my case although I think it also affected other brands) and it worries me that this sounds a similar noise.

I am confident that SMART and Multi_Report are telling me the truth but

(1) is there anything else I could do which is a very low risk test, or can anyone comment if they’ve heard similar sounds please?

(2) Ought I to buy a drop-in replacement 1TB 7200 drive and, if so, in your experience which makes ought I to consider or reject?

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One of the issues that can occur, is that non-NAS drives park their heads a bit too often. None of the 4 drives are NAS or Enterprise types:

WD10EZRX - WD Green, (aka Non-NAS)
WD10EZEX - WD Blue, (aka Non-NAS)

Sometimes you can set the drive’s head parking to a longer interval which won’t normally be triggered. Thus, much reduced clicking. Or, disable it altogether.

For example, my miniature PC running as my media server, (which does use ZFS, but not TrueNAS), has a laptop drive. It tries to park it’s heads too often, so I had to disable that. Before I did, in just a few months it racked up an impressive amount of head parks:

225 Load_Cycle_Count -O–CK 096 096 000 - 48530

As for how to disable / reduce, it is device specific. My 2.5" laptop drive would not keep the setting after a power cycle. So I had to write a startup script to set the parameter on each boot.

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That’s interesting. I bought my TrueNAS secondhand from someone with the drives already part of the setup; when I upgrade I will make sure they’re enterprise grade (specifically “NAS”, or possibly “surveillance” because I remember reading something a few months ago which suggested the latter isn’t as good but is better than non-NAS. Or something).

I will look into the head parking aspects; I didn’t know that such a thing might be feasible. Thanks for the info and it is a relief to hear that the click is likely to be intentional head parking!