6 month old Toshiba disk running at < 50% of its original speed, array operations painfully slow.

[-C-]

In July I added a new 18TB Toshiba MG09ACA18TE.

I was pleased with its speed- as good as, if not better than the 20TB WD drives I have, which were pretty speedy.

 

Since then, any array operations have felt painfully slow. With 20TB parity drives, the last parity check took over 4 days and the one that's currently running is estimated to take over 5 days. It's fluctuating between 35 & 100 MB/sec.

 

Diskspeed docker is showing that its speed is now less than half of what it was when first installed:

 

The most recent test (Nov 15) was made with all other Docker apps disabled and the VM service off.

Speeds of the other disks have remained stable.

 

Only thing I can think that happened between the Jul & Sep tests is that I cleared the drive and formatted it as ZFS- could that have had this affect? If so, is there anything I can do about it?

[JorgeB]

50 minutes ago, -C- said:

and formatted it as ZFS- could that have had this affect?

No, the diskspeed test it's filesystem agnostic.

[-C-]

6 hours ago, JorgeB said:

it's filesystem agnostic.

As I had hoped/ assumed, which begs the question- what else could be causing this?

[JorgeB]

Could be a disk issue, also check that the disk is still linking at SATA3 speeds.

[-C-]

I'm seeing this for the disk

 

There are no SMART errors.

 

Is it worth trying a different SATA cable, or is there no way it's a cabling issue if it's syncing at 6 Gb/s?

[JorgeB]

Unlikely that a cable would be the problem without leaving anything logged in the syslog.

[-C-]

Following multiple strange issues with my server and increasing weird things going on with this drive, I became ever more suspicious of it. Some examples:

• Unreliable reading or writing and huge usage of resources when attempting to
• unable to copy files off it using Unbalanced (it would eventually time out while doing its initial scan of certain directories and return to its start page).
• Strange permissions issues or permissions changing and trying to set a chmod command would hang indefinitely.
• If I tried to get the size of a directory using File Manager's calculate button on certain directories, it would hang indefinitely.
• There are some directories I've successfully used Unbalanced to clear files out of and onto another drive, but now can't delete the empty directories, even via CLI.

So I've been moving data off. Long, slow process as I'm not sure whether a move is going slowly due to large backup image files, or whether it has hung.

I've nearly finished and what's left on there is of low importance, so I'm about to remove the drive.

 

My suspicion though is that there's something wrong with Unraid's management of the file system/ FUSE regarding this particular disk and it's been causing huge performance issues system-wide. For another clue to something being awry, have a look at the transfer rate of it, taken a few minutes ago (there was no actual activity on that drive that I know of):

 

This is a regular SATA HDD- there's no way it could ever attain that kind of speed.

 

Now that I've got any valuable data off and am at a point of being able to clear it, what is the best method of clearing the drive completely so that any FUSE linking to it is destroyed and I can try it again as if it was a fresh drive to Unraid?

 

 

[JorgeB]

9 hours ago, -C- said:

My suspicion though is that there's something wrong with Unraid's management of the file system/ FUSE regarding this particular disk and it's been causing huge performance issues system-wide.

That seems very unlikely to me, my first guess would be a disk problem.

 

9 hours ago, -C- said:

This is a regular SATA HDD- there's no way it could ever attain that kind of speed.

Not sure what you mean, it's reporting 800KB/s, not MB/s.

[-C-]

2 hours ago, JorgeB said:

That seems very unlikely to me, my first guess would be a disk problem.

 

Thanks Jorge, I don't know much about the inner workings, but I figure if I can take this disk out of use and try deleting all links to it from Unraid, then try again as if it was a fresh disk to Unraid- if it continues to have issues then I know it's disk issues, if not then it was a software issue. It certainly isn't happy as it is and causing system-wide issues, so I have to do something.

 

2 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Not sure what you mean, it's reporting 800KB/s, not MB/s.

 

Haha- oh yes, it was late! Still shouldn't have been anything accessing that drive (the only things that are left on there are old archive files), yet it's had this constant read rate at idle for a while now. Nothing listed for this HDD under disk activity or Open Files.

 

Can you help with how to remove, clear and replace/ retry?

 

Thanks

[JorgeB]

If you have a spare, and assuming parity is valid, the best way would be to do a direct replacement, if that disk is the problem, it would start to work better after it's removed.

[-C-]

OK, thanks. I will remove it and see how that goes. I don't have a spare drive and prices are not favourable at the moment, so I won't be buying another. If this drive's bad, I'd like to get it replaced by Amazon or the manufacturer.

 

My worry is- how do I prove there's an issue when there are no SMART errors or anything other than poor performance to show there's an issue with it?

[JorgeB]

You can run an extended SMART test, if it takes at longer than the expected time, and that time is in the SMART report, if suggests a disk problem.