I recently bought an 8TB Seagate Backup Plus. I am not adding this drive to my array, I am just going to use it for backing up from the array. However, I am not sure it's functioning correctly.

 

I created a script with User Scripts and rsync to make a backup of some of my data. It starts off ok, but after awhile, it seems to slow way down. When loading the Main page for Unraid, Unassigned Devices sometimes loads after at least 30 seconds, but usually it doesn't. When I would go to the Dashboard page, none of my drives would show up either, not array or cache or any of them.

 

Aborting the script would not fix the problem. Stopping the array would hang as well. I wanna say that powerdown would work after awhile, but when bringing the server back up, it would want to do a parity check.

 

I tried to run an extended smart test, but clicking on the button did nothing. (Clicking on the button for the short test doesn't do anything either.) 

 

I tried to get a diagnostics before I tried stopping the array, but it seemed to hang as well. I'll attach the only one I see from around that time. Note that it doesn't even show the smart info for the Seagate drive. I'll attach one from a diagnostics after bring the server back up.

 

Do I have a bad drive or is there something else going on?

turtle-diagnostics-20171210-1831.zip

ST8000DM004-2CX188_ZCT0147C-20171210-2049 (sdj).txt

Are you coping mostly large files or a lot of small ones? SMR drives can slow down a lot with small files making the system look unresponsive.

That's what I thought at first and at first and I just left it. (Started off with large files, then went to a mix with probably mostly small files.) But I noticed that it didn't improve once it got back to larger files. I should have saved the log from the script, I wanna say that it was down to about 3.5MB max for larger files, but I can't remember if it was a MB or Mb.

 

Even so, should it cause Unassigned Devices to fail to load? Or when it actually does load, to then fail to populate the smart data page? (For that matter, why aren't the smart test buttons in the unraid gui working for that drive even after a reboot while the drive is responsive?)

17 minutes ago, Endy said:

Even so, should it cause Unassigned Devices to fail to load?

No, but it can take a long time to respond if it's waiting for i/o, you could try a copy with only large files and see if there's any difference, if not grab the logs.

Well I restarted the script. It starts off fine, but it seems like it gets slower as it progresses, but so far it's still faster than it was yesterday. I'm seeing around 20MB for larger files (50-100GB in size) at the moment. The gui for UD had a normal response time when the script was started and it's a little sluggish right now, close to 20 seconds to load, but it does load. Sometimes the drive temp shows up and sometimes it doesn't.

Well, it finally finished the script. It did seem to get slower the longer it ran, but it didn't seem to get quite as bad as it was. I don't think the gui failed to load this time at least. I'll look through the log later (it has been saved this time).

 

I'm just a little worried still because this is supposed to be my backup and I need to trust it. Maybe it will be just fine with this initial transfer (just over 5TB) done and now it only has to do a few transfers at a time.