TS-451 - No Spin-Down & Lots of Activity

[rainmaker002]

I'm not terribly concerned about my disks not spinning down, but for the past few weeks I've noticed that my NAS is very loud with disk activity. It comes and goes, but sometimes both disks (WD Red 6TB drives) are going nuts. I'm in Raid-1. The clicking of activity is very loud and obnoxious. It can go for a few minutes and then not hear it again for hours.

Ideally the disks would spindown.

I have a number of qpkg's installed which probably makes troubleshooting difficult. Sickbeard, Plex, Sab and Transmission. But, the disk activity seems to be independent of any actual downloading (it's not very noisy at all while downloading).

I also run Google Drive Sync, which seems to hang from time to time- I'm wondering if that's part of the problem but don't really see a way to diagnose.

Finally, I run Virtualization Station which has Windows 7 running 24/7. This was the first thing I tested- shutting it down at night. I can still hear the disk activity even when it is shut down so I think I've eliminated that as a possible problem.

I ran blkdevMonitor.sh and the results are at http://pastebin.com/LxyqZn5X .

But, I don't really know how to interpret the output. Any suggestions are welcome!

Thank you.

[doktornotor]

Why on earth are you debugging spin-down on drives with VMs running 24/7? Of course they'll never spin-down. FW version and build? Processes running? Services enabled?

[rainmaker002]

Hi There,

I guess a couple of points.

1) I note that I have shut off the virtualized windows OS, with no change in activity. I think that takes care of your first question.
2) 4.1.1 / 20140822
3) http://i.imgur.com/zAn8zez.png for a list of running processes. Keep in mind answer #1, which is that I have tried disabling the virtualized OS (which I believe is represented by the qemu-system-x86_64 process) which does not help.
4) Services running: FTP, OpenVPN, FileStation, Rsync, NFS, Hybrid Desk Station, Microsoft Networking, Web Srver and PPTP VPN Server

Thank you for looking!

[rainmaker002]

Hi There,

I guess a couple of points.

1) I note that I have shut off the virtualized windows OS, with no change in activity. I think that takes care of your first question.
2) 4.1.1 / 20140822
3) http://i.imgur.com/zAn8zez.png for a list of running processes. Keep in mind answer #1, which is that I have tried disabling the virtualized OS (which I believe is represented by the qemu-system-x86_64 process) which does not help.
4) Services running: FTP, OpenVPN, FileStation, Rsync, NFS, Hybrid Desk Station, Microsoft Networking, Web Srver and PPTP VPN Server

Thank you for looking!

[doktornotor]

QEMU running? Thought you got rid of virtualization stuff...

[rainmaker002]

It happens to be running at this moment, yes, but I can assure you that the problem exists whether it is running or not.

[doktornotor]

Well, good luck with this... impossible to debug anything this way. (Also, you seem to be using some beta FW version...)

As a final hint here, check crontab -l output and compare with times of "very loud with disk activity"

[rainmaker002]

Thanks, I will do that.

I have disabled the VM and run blkdevMonitor.sh again. The results are at http://pastebin.com/dfMM0ShB

Do you see anything different that might account for the issue?

Cheers!

[rainmaker002]

bump.

[pwilson]

bump.

You aren't going to get Spindown with iSCSI enabled either. You need to disable all the useful features in order to achieve Spindown. (I choose to ignore Spindown here, as I really don't care if my drives spindown or not).

[rainmaker002]

Gotcha.

I'm not so concerned with spindown as I am with all the racket. I have to turn the server off at night (even though it's in another room) because it is so loud with all the hard drive activity. It is doing something, I just can't figure out what. It sounds like hard drives would sound if you were downloading and unpacking usenet archives or something- literally full blast at undefined intervals. It's driving me (read: my wife) nuts.

[pwilson]

Gotcha.

I'm not so concerned with spindown as I am with all the racket. I have to turn the server off at night (even though it's in another room) because it is so loud with all the hard drive activity. It is doing something, I just can't figure out what. It sounds like hard drives would sound if you were downloading and unpacking usenet archives or something- literally full blast at undefined intervals. It's driving me (read: my wife) nuts.

I'm afraid I have no suggestions for keeping "she who must be obeyed" happy. My TS-470 Pro with 4 * WD WD30EFRX drives is almost completely silent here. (My refrigerator is noisier). I can appreciate the noise issue being a concern tho', as my NAS lives right beside my TV, so that I can use it via HDMI with my TV & AV-Receiver, so I too would be annoyed by excessive noise from it.

[rainmaker002]

Thanks for replying. This is getting a bit off topic but the condition is so obnoxious that I'm wondering if I can reset everything without losing the data. The system was fine for at least the first month and I'm assuming something I installed or changed has caused this behaviour.

Is there a factory reset that doesn't lose the data on the disks- but wipes all addons, qpkg's, etc.?