Lots of writes on Flash, should I be scared, where are they coming from?

[themoose]

So first a little backstory why I'm looking into this: During summer of last year my Unraid was turning off randomly. Eventually it turned out that the CPU Fan was failing randomly which caused the CPU to overheat during heavy load in the hot summer months.

As part of troubleshooting I enabled mirroring the syslog to the flash drive. Unfortunately I forgot about it and never disabled it. So four weeks ago my flash drive died.

 

I had no backups of the drive so it was a pain in the butt to restore it. Under windows I wasn't able to read from the drive at all, but I was finally able to restore about 90% of it by creating an image using ddrescue and restoring data from the image. Fortunately the 10% of data I couldn't restore was nothing important.

 

24 days ago I transferred my Unraid licence a new flash drive and my system is running since then (currently uptime is 24 days 23 hours).

What scares me is that in that 24 days I have 2,414,465 writes to the flash drive. My whole array has only 3,254,303 writes and my cache drive has 32,291,412 writes. So I guess 2.5 million writes in about 20 days is quite much?

But I can't figure out where the writes come from. Syslog mirroring is off.

I tried to find modified files by using this command:

find /boot -newermt "24 day ago" -ls

 

But nothing sticks out:

        5      4 drwx------   9 root     root         4096 Nov 25 13:47 /boot/config
  2197976      4 -rw-------   1 root     root          235 Nov 25 13:47 /boot/config/domain.cfg
      116     84 -rw-------   1 root     root        82694 Nov 15 11:12 /boot/config/plugins/community.applications.plg
     1355      4 drwx------   2 root     root         4096 Nov 15 11:12 /boot/config/plugins/community.applications
  2066991    120 -rw-------   1 root     root       119108 Nov 15 11:12 /boot/config/plugins/community.applications/community.applications-2021.11.13a-x86_64-1.txz
     1356      4 -rw-------   1 root     root          153 Nov 15 11:12 /boot/config/plugins/community.applications/notification_scan.cron
     3655      4 drwx------   2 root     root         4096 Nov  3 11:39 /boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates/limetech
     3670      4 -rw-------   1 root     root         1080 Nov 15 11:13 /boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates/limetech/UnraidNet.xml
     3022      8 -rw-------   1 root     root         5304 Nov  3 11:39 /boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates-user/my-bitwarden.xml
       44      4 -rw-------   1 root     root           93 Nov 25 13:32 /boot/config/plugins/dynamix/monitor.ini
        7      4 -rw-------   1 root     root          669 Nov  1 14:00 /boot/config/ident.cfg

 

I'm really scared that I'm killing another flash drive. Should I be or are these amounts of writes normal?

 

For good measure I thought it would be good to post what's running on my Unraid:

Unraid 6.9.2

Array of 4 Disks (3 Storage, 1 Parity)
1 SSD Cache Drive

 

VMS

Home Assistant Operating System

 

Docker Container

binhex/arch-delugevpn
linuxserver/nginx
vaultwarden/server
bitnami/redis
linuxserver/duplicati
electricbrainuk/unraidapi
nicolargo/glances
hotio/cloudflareddns
linuxserver/swag
linuxserver/mariadb
linuxserver/nextcloud
phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
linuxserver/heimdall
linuxserver/tvheadend

 

Plugins

Community Applications
Dynamix Active Streams
Dynamix System Information
Dynamix System Statistics
Dynamix System Temperature
Dynamix WireGuard
Nerd Tools
Speedtest Command Line Tool
User Scripts
Wake On Lan support

 

Edited November 25, 2021 by themoose

[Frank1940]

What I would do is to make a note of the exact count of the writes to the flash drive.  Then I would stop the various  Dockers and VM's to see which one is causing the problem.   I would probably start with the Home Assistant OS VM.  (I picked this one because I am not familiar with what it really does...)

[themoose]

Home Assistant is a home automation software. Home Assistant OS is a minimal Linux designed to run Home Assistant. It's

 

So I've had some time now and I've found the culprit by removing every plugin one by one and stopping every docker container one by one.

I stopped one thing, waited a day and then had took a look at the flash drive writes.

 

It turned out to be the Unraid API Docker. I don't know why but since I don't really use it that much I can live without it