Should SMART tests catch the "click of death"?

TrueNAS General
1

I have a two disk (mirrored) system, still running TrueNAS-13.0-U6.7.

It has developed a steady clicking, every 10 or so seconds, that I believe is the Click Of Death.

Data’s all safely duplicated other places, so I’m not freaked out, and will replace the drive in the next couple of days.

BUT, I’m not seeing any errors anywhere in /var/log and running manual SMART tests didn’t return any errors (long and short).

I’m wondering if I’m missing something about how to use the SMART tests (viewed results with smartctl -l selftest /dev/adaX).

It seems that the drive should be complaining somewhere…

What, if anything, am I missing?

2

Oy… Just figured out smartctl -a /dev/adaX.

Any suggestions about how to interpret the output (or pointers to nice posts?)?

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Where is your System Dataset?

zfs list -t filesystem -r | grep "\.system"
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It’s on boot-pool, which is a single disk pool on an Transcend-TS128GMTE110S solid state drive.

I can post the full output of the zfs list command if those details are relevant.

Note that this is not the sound that normal disks make, it’s a very loud click, which triggers my fight/flight responses…

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What model hard drive? Not at my computer sorry.

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They’re western digital REDs, WD30EFRX.

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Short and long SMART tests are all about platter condition. Only the conveyance test slightly deals with mechanical condition.
So the answer to the title question is essentially: No.

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8

A drive experiencing the click of death can’t write or read data correctly, at all.

In other words, that drive would fail a SMART test, since the actuator wouldn’t work as intended when it tried to do such a test.

If it’s “only” making a clicking sound but otherwise (apparently) functioning normally it’s something else, or possibly a precursor to what could become the click of death later.

If this noise is new it’s a good reminder to have backups of any important data. A single copy on a NAS is not a backup.

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9

Thanks for the info!

This data is nicely Rule of 3’s…

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If it were something other than a NAS drive, I’d suspect too aggressive head parking. Desktop HDDs tend to have such enabled.

Not sure how to check for it, only how to disable it. And not how to do that on TrueNAS Core.

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11

Without a dump of the data smartctl -x /dev/adaX it is difficult to see what is happening.

SMART at best trys to give you a 24 hour heads up of pending doom, however that is not always the case. You could look at the smart data for the past several weeks to see if the spinup time has changed. Or you could check if hardware errors increased.

What I have found is a motor problem where the platters cannot maintain speed. The heads try to load and read the platter data. If the platters spin too fast or too slow, the heads unload and try again. And you now have the clicking noise.

Sudden motor/drive electronic failures do happen but often are not caught by predictions.

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12

In your disk activity page, do you see any reads or writes that coincide with the clicking interval?

Do you hear a “spin up” pitch with these clicks?

13

Mystery solved, BIG THANK YOU to everyone who made suggestions!

Turned out that a bit of wiring was blocking the case fan.

This system is an old ODROID-H2 in one of the two disk cases. At some point in the past I had to replace the muffin fan and ended up with bulky splices between the old harness and the new fan.

Somehow, probably when I had to move the shelf to deal with a water leak from the neighboring condo, one of the splices ended up poking into the muffin fan.

The click was the fan trying to spin, stopping, then trying again a moment later.

It was obvious where the sound was coming from once I repositioned the case so that I could try ID the “bad drive” aurally.

Not surprising that the SMART tests weren’t showing anything, I don’t that the case fan is part of their area of responsibility… :upside_down_face:

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14

I missed that part in your opening post. Apologies for skipping over it. I’ll try to read more carefully next time.

15

@winnielinnie – You didn’t miss anything, I didn’t include the physical details about the case/motherboard because I assumed that it was the disks.

Bad assumption on my part.

Thanks for the help!

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