HDD drive spinning up for no reason


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Hi,

 

this weekend I set up my first unraid. Now I'm at the point where I would expect my hdd drives to spin up only when doing certain things. Having set up a spin down time of 15 minutes I don't see them spinning down at all. After some investigation I realized docker to be responsible. When stopping all docker containers the disks spin down and stay that way. Now to make it easier to troubleshoot I limited my further testing to only a single docker container: CaddyV2. It's a reverse proxy not doing much file wise and I have all volume mappings pointed to the cache drive:

 

image.thumb.png.31965c3c7811da65d79c21fc75803da1.png

 

Here are my user shares, as you can see only custom shares are on disk 1 and everything system related is on cache only:

 

image.thumb.png.7194a624adb007d07a4f9539d557fe37.png

 

I've installed the open files plugin to see what's being accessed, here's a screenshot from when my drives just spun up after starting CaddyV2:

 

image.thumb.png.2fb59f71a8c4b00c76e0a041c86db540.png

 

And here how it looks like while no dockers are running and the drives are spun down:

 

image.thumb.png.41d596a77331c267dc28227e1ee767c8.png

 

So containers-shim seems to the the only difference. Any idea on how those files in /var/lib/docker are making the drive spin up and others are not?

Where are /lib/modules/ or /var/lib/docker stored anyway? Can't find then on neither the flash drive, cache or array...

 

What might be relevant:

I've installed unraid and first added only disk 1 to the array - without a parity or cache disk. I added those only when I had also added disk 2 and all my data was transferred. Then I moved all the system related stuff to cache. The spin up behaviour can only be seen on disk 1 so I assume there might be something system related installed.

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30 minutes ago, epp said:

Where are /lib/modules/ or /var/lib/docker stored anyway?

Like anything that is an OS path, they are in RAM only. The unRAID OS is unpacked from the flash drive and runs in RAM when the server is booted.  These location would only be accessible via the command line (terminal, PuTTY, etc.)

 

Click the View button (folder icon) on the Shares screen for shares you think should only be on the cache drive.  This will show what locations contain files for those shares.  It is possible that something remains on disk1  from appdata or another active system share.

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8 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

Like anything that is an OS path, they are in RAM only. The unRAID OS is unpacked from the flash drive and runs in RAM when the server is booted.  These location would only be accessible via the command line (terminal, PuTTY, etc.)

 

Click the View button (folder icon) on the Shares screen for shares you think should only be on the cache drive.  This will show what locations contain files for those shares.  It is possible that something remains on disk1  from appdata or another active system share.

 

I think you will find that those particular locations are exceptions to the general rule of everything not under /mnt being in RAM :(.   

 

/var/lib/docker is where the docker image file is mounted, and /lib/modules is where the 'bzmodules' file on the flash drive is mounted as an overlay file system.

 

@epp You are likely to get better informed feedback if you attach your systems diagnostics zip file (obtained via Tools->Diagnostics) to your NEXT post.  

  • Thanks 1
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1 minute ago, itimpi said:

I think you will find that those particular locations are exceptions to the general rule of everything not under /mnt being in RAM :(.   

 

/var/lib/docker is where the docker image file is mounted, and /lib/modules is where the 'bzmodules' file on the flash drive is mounted as an overlay file system.

Well, there you go, I learned something new.  Thanks!

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3 hours ago, itimpi said:

@epp You are likely to get better informed feedback if you attach your systems diagnostics zip file (obtained via Tools->Diagnostics) to your NEXT post.  

Thanks for the hint @itimpi, pretty new to unraid - I'll keep in mind attaching it immediately next time :D

 

I attached the diagnostics log to this post. Tried to find out if anything remaining on disk1 is being used but can't find anything... :/

hal-diagnostics-20210301-2103.zip

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I have figgured out the problem:

I had the zsh, tmux und ncurses-terminfo installed via nerd tools. After removing those the disks didn't keep spinning up anymore. My guess is zsh was accessing disk1 for some weired reason ... will survive without it and maybe try later to get it working again.

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  • 4 months later...
On 3/1/2021 at 2:07 PM, epp said:

I have figgured out the problem:

I had the zsh, tmux und ncurses-terminfo installed via nerd tools. After removing those the disks didn't keep spinning up anymore. My guess is zsh was accessing disk1 for some weired reason ... will survive without it and maybe try later to get it working again.

 

Can you tell me how you came to learn it was Nerd Tools?

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  • 4 weeks later...

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