Hello,

 

Recently moved my build into a rackmount case, swapped out my LSI 9201 HBA for an Adaptec 71605 (with brand new store bought Silverstone cables), and hooked everything up. Everything has been going well, but I have noticed that when I'm sitting idle in UnRaid (as in, not doing a parity check or transferring files) one or two of my disks are being pinged every second. It's like I'm sitting in a room with an old clock. At first, I thought maybe something was wrong with the drive - so I did extended SMART tests on all of my drives (within UnRaid), and also loaded up Seagate's SeaTools to run more long tests on my Seagate drives, with every drive passing with flying colours. I then noticed that the noise synced with the HDD activity LED on my disk enclosure (SilverStone FS305-12G), holding my array drives (2xBarracuda Pro 10TB, 2x Exos 10TB, and 1 WD Red Plus 12TB (Parity)). The disks in my second FS305-12G, holding a RAIDZ1 ZFS pool (All 3TB WD Red CMR drives), never get pinged with this activity, so it has something to do with activity hitting the array.

 

I've tried to capture a video of it, not the easiest to hear since there are a bunch of case fans blasting away. 

 

Activity is currently focused on my Barracuda Drives (Disk 3 and 5 in array).

 

Any idea what could be causing this?

 

Thanks

 

(Edit: I've included one of the SeaTools Test Result screenshots, but all of my Seagate drives had the same results, and the lone WD Red Plus 12TB in the array passed an extended Smart test within UnRaid)

 

tower-diagnostics-20250421-2355.zip

Edited April 21, 20251 yr by Lebowski89

Need to know a little more what kinds of services are you running on your server? Docker Containers? VMs?

 

Something sort of concerning is your share configuration, if you're not using these shares and they really don't exist, it's best to clean them up.

c------e                          shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
d--a                              shareUseCache="no"      # Share exists on disk1, disk2, disk3, disk5
g-------e                         shareUseCache="yes"     # Share does not exist
L----------------------1          shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
L------------------------2        shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
L------------------------3        shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
L------------------------4        shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
l---l                             shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
m------s                          shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
m----------e                      shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
M---c                             shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
P--x                              shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
s-----e                           shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
s-----------1                     shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
s------1                          shareUseCache="only"    # Share exists on skynet
t-------t                         shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist
z-------1                         shareUseCache="no"      # Share does not exist

 

 

Your Skynet pool, what contents do you keep on it? The more important question is what contents are on the what I presume is a "data" share on your array?

be aware that drives from different vendors might behave differently in a hot plug slot.

On some the LED is always on (to show that the cage is populated), some others flash only if there is real activity and some others might blink even if there is just a status update request from the OS or the HBA.

So your flashing might be totally harmless.

 

21 hours ago, MowMdown said:

Need to know a little more what kinds of services are you running on your server? Docker Containers? VMs?

I've just moved to virtualise UnRaid under Proxmox. So I've just got rid of all docker containers / VM within UnRaid, so will have to fix those shares. Pretty much going forward - UnRaid is going to be used strictly as a NAS, with other VMs and machines accessing my UnRaid Media share via NFS (mainly NFS docker volumes).

 

20 hours ago, MAM59 said:

be aware that drives from different vendors might behave differently in a hot plug slot.

 

I see. I'm only really making this topic because I've had those disks in the same hot swap enclosure for years. Granted, it was in a Lian Li PC-P80B case with 5x14CM fans blasting away (3 right in front of the enclosures) - but I thought I would have noticed such a sound before, since my head was directly next to the Lian Li during that time. I think you're right in that it is probably harmless. Annoying, but harmless. I've moved everything into rackmounts, and will soon be sitting further away from my server.

 

Just to add:  My Seagate drives were racking up the usual extra load cycles that they're known for (especially the Exos), so I ran through the Seatools to disable the EPC, etc, as detailed here (and that pretty much halted the load cycles in their tracks): 

 

Haven't really messed with any other setting.

 

20 hours ago, MAM59 said:

or the HBA.

 

Yeah, this is my first time using an Adaptec Raid (in HBA mode) card. So I also wasn't sure if it is something to do with this - since I've always used an LSI 9201-16e. Apart from going into the Adaptec menu to change to HBA mode, I've left everything else standard.

Edited April 22, 20251 yr by Lebowski89