Intermittent pausing driving me crazy!

[Torquewrench]

Hi,

 

This is a new behavior where my unraid server is pausing for 1-30sec. This pausing is a total system freeze and affects all operations including terminal sessions, file transfers, videos playing, etc. The frequency and duration of the pauses varies. This is a new behavior and I haven't recently changed any hardware or software.

 

Here's a description of the system:

 

ASUS A7N8X-E m/b

AMD Athlon 2500+ processor

1GB memory, 1 stick

5 1.5TB, 1 1TB drives (drives are pretty full, 10-20GB left on each if this might matter)

27GB system drive running slackware 12.2

2GB Cruzer running unRAID 4.4.2

MV8 PCI-X controller card

 

Tried running just from USB stick (not running full slackware), same behavior

Drives were running 39-42C, put a big fan in front of it and got drive temps down to 34-36C, same behavior

Drives are not ticking or clunking

All drives pass SMART short test, running long tests but so far no failures

Located files on individual disks (pausing files not located on just one disk), ran SMART Long test on these drives first, passed, now running Long test on other disks.

 

My thought is that this is a hardware failure and not the disks so my plan is to swap in another motherboard, ram, processor, and power supply. I only have one controller so I can't swap this.

 

Has anyone else seen this behavior? If there is a simple fix or a likely root cause I'd love to hear it.

 

Thanks,

 

Phil/TW

[DocBlock]

Are those disks WD 1.5TB Green disks, by any chance? I know that if you search for WD15EADS-00P8B0 on Google, you'll get a lot of people reporting these drives acting similarly to what you're describing. Perhaps with so many of them, you're seeing it 5x as often? Just a thought.

 

It should be easy enough to remove those disks and test without them to see if your problem goes away.

[Torquewrench]

All seagates, all but one 7200rpm. Beyond the smart long test, any recommendations on testing the drives?

[bcbgboy13]

Just a suggestion.

This is an OLD motherboard (and NVidia based one)

Sometimes you could lose your CMOS configuration and the board will reset to the default settings. Perhaps you should investigate this.

[Torquewrench]

Definitely worth a check to make sure the bios settings are still there, I'll give it a look.

[Rajahal]

I've noticed this behavior when streaming music and seeding torrents from my unRAID server on my Windows 7 computer.  Turns out it is a Windows issue, not something that LimeTech can fix.  Streaming music from my Linux-based XBMC HTPC does not have this problem.

 

So, basically, does this problem only occur when you are accessing unRAID from your Windows computer?

[Torquewrench]

Checked the BIOS, all settings intact.

 

It appears that this is a result of running rtorrent and low disk space (<5GB). When I deleted some recordings and freed up ~50GB the problem disappeared.

 

Regarding Windows being at fault, I see the pausing even when logged into a terminal, so it's not a Windows thing.