unRAID continuously reads drive

[Fatal_Flaw]

I've been rearranging and replacing drives. Because of this I've created a new config. Now when I try to copy a file over to the server, it will sometimes continuously read the disk that it should be copying too. The file transfer seems to timeout. Meanwhile, the drive just keeps getting read, with the occasional write showing up. During this time, it's nearly impossible to even just change directories on the disk. The most recent time it happened, I let it go for ~45 minutes and it was still reading. I tried to stop the shares via the web interface, but it just kept saying "Retry unmounting user share(s)" over and over again. I ended up having to force it to power off.

 

Any ideas why this is happening?

[WeeboTech]

Check out this post and see if it's relevant.

 

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=35743.msg333021#msg333021

[Brucey7]

One of the reasons you might get millions of reads whilst trying to write, is if you had a copy fail in the past. Typically, the failure would have timed out and left an incomplete copy on your unraid server which reports it is the size of the source file, but it actually isn't.  When you delete that file (which often you can't do without rebooting unRAID), and then try to re-use the space.  It seems to be scanning the file system to work out what is correct and what isn't, often it might scan the entire disk.

 

The good news is that when it has finished, it's usually tickety-boo.

 

I should add this is my "informed guess" as to what it is actually doing.  It could just be that ReiserFS is as crazy as it's author.

[Fatal_Flaw]

One of the reasons you might get millions of reads whilst trying to write, is if you had a copy fail in the past. Typically, the failure would have timed out and left an incomplete copy on your unraid server which reports it is the size of the source file, but it actually isn't.  When you delete that file (which often you can't do without rebooting unRAID), and then try to re-use the space.  It seems to be scanning the file system to work out what is correct and what isn't, often it might scan the entire disk.

 

The good news is that when it has finished, it's usually tickety-boo.

 

I should add this is my "informed guess" as to what it is actually doing.  It could just be that ReiserFS is as crazy as it's author.

 

 

Damn. I think you nailed it.

 

The file did show up (at least partially), despite the transfer reportedly timing out before it could do anything. Trying to delete the partial file on the server did hang things up. I guess the problem arises from having to wait for the system to scan a 3tb disk. Any thoughts on how to safely abort that process? Like I described previously, I tried to stop the shares after about 45 minutes. That didn't work, presumably because some process had that partial file locked. I then force a shut down. When I powered back on, I was able to delete that file without issue. Any ideas if I borked the file system on that drive? I suppose I should run reiserfsck just in case.

 

Thanks!

[Brucey7]

I have aborted it and usually it's ok after that, by best guesstimate is that it reads the entire disk even when it may already have fixed the corruption. 

 

I have tried Reiserfsck but it doesn't find anything wrong which is strange.

[WeeboTech]

I guess the problem arises from having to wait for the system to scan a 3tb disk.

 

I've had this type of problem when the filesystem is nearly full and I'm adding a new file to a deep directory.

hence the timeout. usually doing the move/copy again resolves it after the whole file structure has been scanned.

 

What version of unRAID are you using?

Did you look at the syslog for errors? There could have been hard disk errors.

Can you look at the smart information for and pending or reallocated sectors?

 

I should have read the message better, I did not see where it was active/busy for 45 minutes.

 

Anyway dumps of the syslog and smart data is crucial to insuring it's not a hardware or critical ReiserFS bug.

[Duppie]

Hi All,

 

Did someone fine a solution to this? This is really frustrating. ;-(

 

My Unraid server is about 96% full with 580GB free space and it takes forever to copy a 300MB file to it.

 

I have also changed the rules of the shares to follow "High-Water" allocation and with no levels.

 

Any help to fix this will be appreciated and how t stop such a process. Version is 5.06

 

Thanks

 

Duppie