I have five hard disks installed on my truenas, four of which are ST4000VX016 and one is Toshiba MG08ACA. Before, if the five hard disks were not read or written for a period of time (I set it to 10 minutes), they could normally enter the standby state and hibernate. But since last Sunday, the Toshiba MG08ACA hard disk cannot enter the standby state and has been in the active/idle state, while the other four hard disks are still normal. I carefully checked the configuration of the five hard disks on the truenas, and I am sure that their configurations are the same. But I can manually put the Toshiba MG08ACA into the standby state by executing sudo smartctl -s on -s standby,300 /dev/sdX. But if the hard disk is woken up here, the Toshiba MG08ACA will not be able to enter the hibernation again after being idle unless I execute sudo smartctl -s on -s standby,300 /dev/sdX again. In short, the Toshiba MG08ACA hard drive can no longer automatically enter standby mode. I found some errors with the Toshiba MG08ACA through smartctl, and I’m not sure if these errors are the cause, so I hope someone with experience can give me some guidance. I will attach some of my screenshots below. /dev/sdc is the Toshiba MG08ACA hard drive, and /dev/sda is the ST4000VX016.
Truenas started the hard disk offline self-check on Sunday, but I restarted Truenas before the self-build was completed, so the offline self-check was interrupted, which can be seen from the smartctl-of-sdc.txt attachment. I am not sure if this is the reason why the hard disk cannot sleep, but I am sure it is the only operation I have.
You can power down the drive, wait a few seconds, then power back up. This will clear anything that the drive might be doing. However I doubt this is the reason, but who knows.
When you try to think of things, it doesn’t need to be specifically related to TrueNAS. You have not shared details of your pool makeup so I don’t know if this drive is a log drive, part of a RAIDZ1, or a single stripe.
Lets assume it is a single stripe and shared via SMB. Any computer on your network could wake it up. I do not think that is likely if you can manually put the drive to sleep and it remains that way.
Did you do any configuration changes, add/delete/modify a VM or similar? You are apt to be surprised what caused it, once you have found it.
Good luck, I’m sure you will figure it out, then slap your head for not seeing it sooner.
I think it would also be helpful to understand why do you want the drives to go into standby mode. Unless you really never use the drives, spinning them down means they wear faster and offset any power efficiency gains.
Great idea for an ssd array. Not so great for spinning platters. Good luck. Not to jinx you, but the only drive I’ve ever had to replace so far was a 3tb Toshiba.
In the future, it may make sense to have tiered storage. A big slow tier you don’t access often, and a small quick tier you access a lot. You can have 2 pools and sleep the big pool most of the time, and sleep the small pool without torturing it, using ssd’s or nvme drives. And maybe that box is powered by a battery bank fed from solar so you can save a few bucks. Just some food for thought.
After some attempts, I found that the reason why the Toshiba MG08ACA does not automatically enter standby is that Auto Offline Data Collection is enabled. Does anyone know why enabling Auto Offline Data Collection will cause the Toshiba MG08ACA to not automatically enter standby?
