daTroll

Perhaps @AndrewZ can shed some light?

Ah... but the GUI doesn't display any temp for a disk that is in standby mode, it only shows * (an asterisk) instead. It seems to me that an OS could determine whether there is any actual IO on a HDD without asking the controller for stats every second, no??

Fair enough, and perhaps I wasn't expressing myself clearly. My dockers and VM are both disabled and stopped, and I can still see the activity LEDs are flashing for drives that are in standby mode (not spinning). Side note: I suppose that UnRAID will not automatically spin down a drive that has the system share or a VM domain on it. For my external drives, the GUI will clearly show when all four drives are in standby mode, and still the LEDs are flashing.

This is interesting! My LEDs are flashing about twice every second (i.e. 4 times as fast as yours). Maybe you are onto something, but why would UnRAID want to read the IO stats from the controller of a disk that UnRAID has put in standby mode?

Correct, and this is a drive that is mounted internally in my mini-PC.

VM & the Plex docker are definitely not running, and it is still happening. The system share is not on any of the disks in the external enclosure.

But the drives do spin down! This I can see both in the GUI and hear from the enclosure. It's just that the fans keep spinning and the LEDs are flashing. When I attach this enclosure and drives to a Windows PC, both the drives and the enclosure are successfully put into sleep mode (and the LEDs go dark). It's only with UnRAID that the enclosure doesn't sleep. In other words: UnRAID doesn't allow the enclosure to enter sleep mode and the flashing of the activity LEDs appears to be directly related to this. A friend of mine has a similar setup, but using different brands and models of hardware. He has noticed the same thing, that the external enclosure is never put to sleep automatically when the drives in his enclosure are on standby/spun down.

It still doesn't sleep without any docker or VM enabled. /mnt/user/system/libvert is on an internal drive, i.e. not on one of the external drives in the TerraMaster enclosure that this topic is about.

The system share is on a different cache drive, which is on an internal NVMe disk. Full details (I suppose) are in the attached diagnostics. untroll-diagnostics-20220703-1911.zip

No VM is running and the only docker is Plex-Media-Server. However, stopping this docker makes no difference; the LEDs are still flashing.

All drives are assigned (parity + two data drives + cache) and the same behaviour is also present when I reboot in safe mode. What I can see on the LEDs is that there is activity from the server when the drives are in standby mode (automated spin down as configured in the GUI). It’s as if the server is checking whether the drives are still there. The LEDs are then flashing at about 2 Hz frequency, all of them together. When the drives are spinning but there is no actual use, then the LEDs are just on without flashing.

I notice that UnRAID continues to interrogate hard drives in an external USB enclosure when the drives are in standby status (spun down with a grey indicator in the GUI). This interrogation is visible by the relevant drive LEDs flashing rapidly on the external USB enclosure. If there are more than one drive in standby mode, the flashing is perfectly synchronised across all LEDs. I have tried to reboot in safe mode, but it is the same behaviour. A friend of mine with different PC & enclosure hardware has noticed the same thing on his setup. Can we get an option to disable this interrogation of external hard drives that are in standby mode, please? This will allow my external enclosure to go into hibernation and shut down the fans (there is no manual override of the fans), which will make UnRAID better suited for a low-power & eco-friendly deployment.

Is there some way I can monitor what the UnRAID server is doing with hard drives that are spun down and in standby mode? The flashing LEDs show that there is activity of some sort...

I have built a low-power UnRAID server using a mini-PC (Zotac i5 https://www.zotac.com/de/product/mini_pcs/zbox-edge-mi646-barebone-0) and a USB 3.1 JBoD case (TerraMaster D4-300 https://www.terra-master.com/global/products/d4-300.html). The performance is good enough as my purposes are cold storage of media files and TimeMachine target of backups. However, I notice that the TerraMaster enclosure never goes into hibernation mode. When all of the drives are in standby (either by inactivity timeout or manually triggered spin down), the UnRAID GUI indicators are greyed out, but the LEDs are all flashing rapidly in unison and the fans keep on spinning. The flashing LEDs indicate that the UnRAID server continues to check something on the drives even when they are in standby (but no temperature is shown in the GUI). When I connect the same drive enclosure to a Windows PC, the computer ejects the drives (I guess because the file system is not supported), the LEDs go dark and the fans stop spinning. I asked TerraMaster support about this, and all they can say is that they use an "Asmedia USB SATA 5G chipset". Is there a chance that UnRAID can become more ecologically friendly and support the hibernation mode of external drive enclosures like mine?

Wow, thanks for the tips! My incremental backup is finally running. I also notice a significant speed increase by disabling SMB multichannel. B-)

Yup, I went back to the (new) default. It will be interesting to see if the performance for the backups from other three Macs is improved, but I still have no joy with making my main rig do an incremental backup..

I notice that rc5 contains an update to samba: rc.samba: disable SMB Multi Channel by default; add control to Settings/SMB Settings page So I tried enabling SMB multi channel, but it still fails with the same error. By the way, here is the MacOS terminal command I use to get the tail end (the most recent 1 hour, you can edit the --last parameter to whatever suits you) of what Time Machine has done: printf '\[3J' && log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info --last 1h | grep -F 'eMac' | grep -Fv 'etat' | awk -F']' '{print substr($0,1,19), $NF}'

At last I got an acknowledgment that my posts were visible to someone! A few days ago, I spotted this not completely unrelated post: https://larryjordan.com/articles/time-machine-causes-conflicts-with-external-storage-and-final-cut-pro-10-6-2/ I will now proceed to report the issue to Apple under macOS/Time Machine here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/ Maybe you would like to do the same, jimsefton?

Despite my user name, I’m not trying to troll you. My request for help is genuine. I’m the same “daTroll” that you can find on Twitter and FB.

untroll-diagnostics-20220408-1201.zip

I'm running UnRAID 6.10.0-rc4 on a Zotac MI646-BE (Core i5 1135G7). Four macs are in the household: 2021 iMac, 2016 MBP, 2018 Mac mini and 2019 iMac 27". The first is an M1 CPU, all the others are Intel. All are running macOS 12.3.1 Monterey. Three of the macs are happy to use one common TM share on the unRAID server. These macs have between 250GB and 750GB of files each. The 2019 iMac 27" has 2.6TB of files and for this one I'm unable to complete any incremental backup. Only the first backup completes (after more than two days). I have tried to redo the initial backup four times, the last time to a dedicated share only for this machine. Here is the log output on the iMac, invariably I always get the same error. Can anyone of you please suggest what I shall do next? 2022-04-08 11:25:47 Starting manual backup 2022-04-08 11:25:50 Attempting to mount 'smb://tomas@unTroll._smb._tcp.local/TM-Troll' 2022-04-08 11:25:52 Mounted 'smb://tomas@unTroll._smb._tcp.local/TM-Troll' at '/Volumes/.timemachine/unTroll._smb._tcp.local/CF962027-28BD-4656-BBBA-B13722B58EC0/TM-Troll' (1.61 TB of 4.19 TB available) 2022-04-08 11:25:52 Initial network volume parameters for 'TM-Troll' {disablePrimaryReconnect: 0, disableSecondaryReconnect: 0, reconnectTimeOut: 60, QoS: 0x0, attributes: 0x1C} 2022-04-08 11:25:53 Configured network volume parameters for 'TM-Troll' {disablePrimaryReconnect: 0, disableSecondaryReconnect: 0, reconnectTimeOut: 30, QoS: 0x20, attributes: 0x1C} 2022-04-08 11:26:09 Skipping periodic backup verification: not needed for an APFS sparsebundle 2022-04-08 11:26:10 'Troll.sparsebundle' does not need resizing - current logical size is 3.98 TB (3,984,588,800,000 bytes), size limit is 3.98 TB (3,984,588,800,000 bytes) 2022-04-08 11:26:10 Mountpoint '/Volumes/.timemachine/unTroll._smb._tcp.local/CF962027-28BD-4656-BBBA-B13722B58EC0/TM-Troll' is still valid 2022-04-08 11:26:10 Checking for runtime corruption on '/Volumes/.timemachine/unTroll._smb._tcp.local/CF962027-28BD-4656-BBBA-B13722B58EC0/TM-Troll/Troll.sparsebundle' 2022-04-08 11:26:49 Failed to attach using DiskImages2 to url '/Volumes/.timemachine/unTroll._smb._tcp.local/CF962027-28BD-4656-BBBA-B13722B58EC0/TM-Troll/Troll.sparsebundle', error: Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=19 "Operation not supported by device" UserInfo={DIErrorVerboseInfo=Failed to initialize IO manager: Failed opening folder for entries reading} 2022-04-08 11:26:53 Failed to unmount '/Volumes/.timemachine/unTroll._smb._tcp.local/CF962027-28BD-4656-BBBA-B13722B58EC0/TM-Troll', Disk Management error: { 2022-04-08 11:26:53 Failed to unmount '/Volumes/.timemachine/unTroll._smb._tcp.local/CF962027-28BD-4656-BBBA-B13722B58EC0/TM-Troll', error: Error Domain=com.apple.diskmanagement Code=0 "No error" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=No error, NSLocalizedDescription=No Error.}

What’s recommended then? The NUC 11 Pro kit also has USB 4, Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4. I’d be interested in an enclosure for up to 4 drives.

I’m also new here, and impressed already with the high quality of community posts. Despite my user name, I have no intention of trolling anyone here. I plan to build a low power unRAID server based on Intel’s NUC 11 i3 and a bunch of SATA drives in a USB-C enclosure. The NUC is ordered with a preliminary ETA of January ‘22, so I still have time to figure things out. My use cases are to host TimeMachine backups (there are six Macs in my household), a Plex server and, perhaps sometime later next year, a few CCTV cams.