Hard drive access never stops ?!

[NeilR]

I have a TS-251+ with a 2 x 2Tb WD Red drive RAID. It's all good but the disk activity NEVER stops, and I mean never.
I can come down in the middle of the night and the drives are still whirring away. What on earth is going on ? I haven't installed any apps, updates or new files for weeks and yet it's constantly flashing away doing something ... any ideas on how I can track down what's going on ? I can't see the disks lasting if they're being hammered 24/7.

[dolbyman]

did you bother to read other threads in here ..?

this is a recent one

viewtopic.php?f=55&t=133516

I can't see the disks lasting if they're being hammered 24/7.

NAS drives are made for 24/7 usage so they should be fine

[NeilR]

I did do a search for 'disk continual access' or somesuch, nothing much came up .. The search on these sort of forums isn't too clever.

Anyway, this isn't a case of the disks spinning down. Lots of disks remain spun up 24/7 but these are constantly being written to / read from. Both disks.
Chattering away the whole time.

[dolbyman]

the link above points to a program that can identify the write/read access culprits

[Don]

Download station or other P2P programs enabled?

[voy13k]

My WD RED is doing the same thing. I put it down to the HDD firmware feature, can't remember what it's called, which during idle periods keeps constantly reading the disk to find and correct/relocate bad sectors, ahead of them being needed by the system.

The reason I think it's HDD firmware rather than QNAP is that with drive spin down enabled on QNAP my drives actually do spin down, even though I can hear the HDD "chatter" immediately before that. If it was QNAP doing anything I wouldn't expect HDDs to spin down.

With the spindown disabled I can hear the drives working at all times, including dead of night.

[jacobite1]

Are either of you running Plex?

Plex on QNAP does not allow Spindown, which means your drives will spin 24/7 even if they're set to Spindown after a certain period of “inactivity”.

[KubazQNAS]

I am no expert but it seems kind of weird for a "green" NAS to spin all drives at maximum RPM 24/7. In hardware there is a setting to put the drives to sleep and they don't. Obviously, something is not working. My other old NAS OF A different brand only spins the drives up when they are accessed and it's been around for 5 years with no issues. I love everything bout my new QNAP except the constant sniping noise which makes it sound like it's about to take ff to an outer space but despite what the experts say in these discussions, I am not convinced this is normal. The vibrations the NAS gives off when 3 8TB WD Red drives are spinning at their maximum rpm travel up my wall and i hear and feel the constant hum all the time. It NEVER stops even when there is NO activity at all and nothing is connected to it. I disabled everything i could, prevented it from accessing the internet and still it's constantly spun up - all drives at max speed all the time. Funny thing is when i set it up in at my office i remember it being very quiet, the i brought it home and it never stops. So I brought it back to the office to test it and wouldn't you know it - goes idle after exactly the time its set to go idle. when i access when its on my office network it is spins up then after the set time it goes idle. Brought it home and connected it to my home network and it spins all the time and never goes idle. I don't have the know-how to troubleshoot this but what I do now is that something on my home network is causing to constantly spin.

[dolbyman]

99% of all harddrive models just have one speed...so yes..that would be max

maybe some device is access it at home..run the standby test to find out (in helpdesk app)

you can also try a foam pad to isolate the nas from.your furniture