Parity drive keeps spinning up by itself (no read/write activity)

[Kindred]

Hello,

 

I have recently purchased a Toshiba MG08 (16TB) as my new parity drive and it's set to 9 hours spindown delay.

Over the past week it has been spinning up a couple of hours after spinning down by itself while all data disks were remaining spun down (meaning no write/read activity on the array).

 

I tried searching the forums/reddit for similar issues but I couldn't find any solutions. The previous parity drive (now a data drive) never had an issue with my current configuration.

 

Any idea what might be causing this? I am attaching the diagnostics as required.

 

 

Edited December 28, 2023 by Kindred
Removed diagnostics after 1+ month

[Kindred]

Bump. Any idea would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

Issue still persist with only the parity drive spinning up while the data drives don't.

[Kindred]

I have tried deleting the Cache dirs plugin (it was a recent addition) and rebooting the server to no avail. Before rebooting the server I also reset the cache kernel params from 10 to 100.

[etnicor]

Can't help but...

I have 2 MG09 and all I can say is that apm is broken on them. Guess you are lucky to get them to spindown at all

 

Contacted Toshiba support but they had no idea how their apm levels was setup.

 

Spent hours with mine just trying to get them to spindown. Had to write my own script which runs in cron to spin them down.

[Kindred]

1 hour ago, etnicor said:

I have 2 MG09 and all I can say is that apm is broken on them. Guess you are lucky to get them to spindown at all

Oh wow, that’s not promising. I have been thinking it was a problem with the drive itself but I couldn’t find any information about it. I might try to contact Toshiba too. 

 

1 hour ago, etnicor said:

Had to write my own script which runs in cron to spin them down.

Do they ever spin up by themselves (as in without read/write activity) after you spin them down?

Edited November 26, 2023 by Kindred

[Kindred]

I have just noticed that hdparm -B shows an APM level of 128 (128 to 254 should not permit spin down). Should I try setting it to 127?

My other Ironwolf drives that have no issues show APM level = unsupported, so I do not really have something to compare the Toshiba to.

 

EDIT: I tried disabling it by using `hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdX`, I will see if the drive wakes up again in a few hours or not.

Edited November 26, 2023 by Kindred

[Kindred]

Got a new drive of the same model and they are both spinning up for no reason by themselves, even with APM turned off.

They spin up always at the same hour/minute of the day +-5 seconds.

 

Also changed from motherboard SATA ports to a LSI 9207-8i with no results.

 

I'm a bit lost. I guess it is a firmware issue and I cannot fix it.

Edited December 6, 2023 by Kindred

[Bcy]

On 12/6/2023 at 5:51 PM, Kindred said:

Got a new drive of the same model and they are both spinning up for no reason by themselves, even with APM turned off.

They spin up always at the same hour/minute of the day +-5 seconds.

 

Also changed from motherboard SATA ports to a LSI 9207-8i with no results.

 

I'm a bit lost. I guess it is a firmware issue and I cannot fix it.

Did you fix this issue?  I have same issue ......

[Kindred]

Nope, I am just letting them what they want and stopped worrying about disk life since it's just unhealthy given that they are rated for a loads of spin-ups.

To be fair, they are not spinning up as much anymore (but they keep doing it, both parity and data - and both MG08 16TBs and MG09 18TBs). I never really tracked down what was causing them.