May 11, 200818 yr i've been noticing my usb sticks light has been flashing an awful lot, even if the server isn't doing anything.. is this normal?... i'm worried it's going to give it an early death
May 11, 200818 yr Very interesting. The way unRAID is implemented, there should be no accessing of the USB drive, except at bootup and shutdown. There have been more than I would have imagined USB drive failures reported here over the past several months. If there is some bug causing the USB drive to be in constant activity that would certainly help explain that. Most USB drives do not have lights on them (I have one very old stick with this nice feature) but it is not used for unRAID. Anyone else notice frequent I/O to the USB drive?
May 11, 200818 yr Very interesting. The way unRAID is implemented, there should be no accessing of the USB drive, except at bootup and shutdown. There have been more than I would have imagined USB drive failures reported here over the past several months. If there is some bug causing the USB drive to be in constant activity that would certainly help explain that. Most USB drives do not have lights on them (I have one very old stick with this nice feature) but it is not used for unRAID. Anyone else notice frequent I/O to the USB drive? Is you flash drive exported at all so it is visible on the LAN? Perhaps it is your windows box that is scanning it to index the files on it. As already said, nothing should be writing to the flash drive except when you are managing the unRAID array. Frequent reads are not really an issue, frequent writes would be, as flash drives have a somewhat limited number of write cycles (typically millions, but...) Joe L.
May 12, 200818 yr Author Very interesting. The way unRAID is implemented, there should be no accessing of the USB drive, except at bootup and shutdown. There have been more than I would have imagined USB drive failures reported here over the past several months. If there is some bug causing the USB drive to be in constant activity that would certainly help explain that. Most USB drives do not have lights on them (I have one very old stick with this nice feature) but it is not used for unRAID. Anyone else notice frequent I/O to the USB drive? Is you flash drive exported at all so it is visible on the LAN? Perhaps it is your windows box that is scanning it to index the files on it. As already said, nothing should be writing to the flash drive except when you are managing the unRAID array. Frequent reads are not really an issue, frequent writes would be, as flash drives have a somewhat limited number of write cycles (typically millions, but...) Joe L. that seems to of fixed it. it was exported, forgot to turn it off last time i was in there. turned it off waited a couple mins and it was still going, restarted windows and been 5mins now without any reads i actually thought windows didnt' index lan drives
May 13, 200818 yr My light seems to go off every 3 seconds. I have turned off the export on the flash share (dont export). I even turned off my windows machine and it still blinks every 2 seconds. After rebooting the unraid server..same thing. Just to make sure the usb port isnt malfunctioning I just tried a couple different usb ports as well. Any other ideas on this?
May 14, 200818 yr Author My light seems to go off every 3 seconds. I have turned off the export on the flash share (dont export). I even turned off my windows machine and it still blinks every 2 seconds. After rebooting the unraid server..same thing. Just to make sure the usb port isnt malfunctioning I just tried a couple different usb ports as well. Any other ideas on this? try turning off all your other computers and see if it's still flashing, that will determine if it's the unraid causing it, or your other boxes. mine was more then a few seconds on a few seconds off, it was constant, might of stoped for a couple seconds every 10 or more mins
May 14, 200818 yr My light seems to go off every 3 seconds. I have turned off the export on the flash share (dont export). I even turned off my windows machine and it still blinks every 2 seconds. After rebooting the unraid server..same thing. Just to make sure the usb port isnt malfunctioning I just tried a couple different usb ports as well. Any other ideas on this? are you running any scripts to do anything special... something you added to your "go" script perhaps?
May 14, 200818 yr Yeah even with all my other boxes off it still flashes. I went into the go file and commented out each customization making it look like this now: #!/bin/bash # Start the Management Utility /usr/local/sbin/emhttp & # 30% Read Performance Improvement Tweak #sleep 30 #for i in /dev/md* #do # blockdev --setra 2048 $i #done # unRAR #installpkg /boot/Customizations/unrar/unrar-3.7.5-i486-1.tgz # C++ Runtime Libraries #installpkg /boot/Customizations/runtime_libraries/cxxlibs-6.0.8-i486-4.tgz # Bandwidth Monitor NG #installpkg /boot/Customizations/bandwidth_monitor/bwm-ng-0.6-i486-1bj.tgz # ftp adjustment to allow users to see files #cp /boot/vsftpd.conf /etc Even with all boxes off and all customizations commented out it still has the flash every 3 seconds. So Im guessing it has to be the unraid itself? Would the brand of flash matter in this? Its a Kingston DataTraveler. But I have others and hwen popped into a other boxes they dont have the access flashing.
May 14, 200818 yr So thinking that it might be the MB checking to see of the drive was still there (who knows), while unraid was running I took out the USB stick and put in another one. It would do a quick read and then nothing...no more flashing on the new one. I tried with 2 drives..one identical to the one Im using now and the other the same brand but 2gb instead of 1gb. Then I pop the unraid one back in a the flashing starts right up again. Im really clueless on what this is access the drive for?
May 14, 200818 yr You can see some statistics to verify if real writes are occuring. df | grep boot /dev/sde1 505752 114688 391064 23% /boot root@unraid:/sys/block/sde# on my system it is sde so then I did a root@unraid:/sys/block/sde# more /sys/block/sde/stat 616 2215 24772 2990 438 171 7004 68440 0 16950 71430 root@unraid:/sys/block/sde# touch /boot/x.x wait 3 seconds... root@unraid:/sys/block/sde# more /sys/block/sde/stat 616 2215 24772 2990 439 172 7006 68450 0 16960 71440 6th col increments root@unraid:/sys/block/sde# cat /boot/license.txt > /dev/null wait 3 seconds root@unraid:/sys/block/sde# more /sys/block/sde/stat 616 2215 24772 2990 440 172 7007 68460 0 16970 71450 5th col increments So do this on yours and see if there is real IO. If so you can try the following. fuser -vcau /boot To see if anything is mounted or active on the filesystem root@unraid:/sys/block/sde# cd /boot root@unraid:/boot# fuser -vcau /boot USER PID ACCESS COMMAND /boot: root 11328 ..c.. (root)bash and/or Install LSOF http://packages.slackware.it/package.php?q=current/lsof-4.78-i486-1 root@unraid:/boot/custom/usr/share/packages# lsof | grep boot dhcpcd 1565 root 4u IPv4 4250 UDP *:bootpc bash 11328 root cwd DIR 8,65 8192 898 /boot/custom/usr/share/packages lsof 11533 root cwd DIR 8,65 8192 898 /boot/custom/usr/share/packages grep 11534 root cwd DIR 8,65 8192 898 /boot/custom/usr/share/packages lsof 11535 root cwd DIR 8,65 8192 898 /boot/custom/usr/share/packages See if any process is reading/writing/running on the flash. root@unraid:/boot/custom/usr/share/packages# cd / root@unraid:/# lsof | grep boot dhcpcd 1565 root 4u IPv4 4250 UDP *:bootpc Nothing running or mounted after I cd off the mount point.
May 15, 200818 yr Thanks this has helped. Yeah it looks like nothing is really writing to the flash is just flashes the light. OF course things write when I do your commands: touch /boot/x.x or cat /boot/license.txt > /dev/null but other than that the numbers stay the same. Running fuser shows no one accessing the flash, same with lsof. So should I not be worried about the light going off?
May 16, 200818 yr If writes or reads are not incrementing, then perhaps the device is just being polled for activity. Mine does not flash like this, so I can't say there isn't some hidden reason for access. However, it may not be as critical as you believe.
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