Constant Disk Activity - Probably Explained

[OneCD]

@prrovoss, have you checked whether your drive supports this?

Display your SMART data:

Code: Select all

smartctl -a /dev/sda

Then check the 'capabilities' section output (this is from one of my WD30EFRX drives):

capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.

[ChuckDavis666]

@OneCD - Did you notice any change in background disk activity when you switched to Debian? BMS/BGMS/PWL may be contributing to the disk activity/noise, but I'm increasingly suspicious that there are background QTS functions that don't show up in Resource Monitor and aren't taken into account if/when QTS decides to spin down disks based on the inactivity timer.

[OneCD]

@OneCD - Did you notice any change in background disk activity when you switched to Debian?

Couldn't say - those WD Reds are fantastically quiet.

but I'm increasingly suspicious that there are background QTS functions that don't show up in Resource Monitor

I'd say that's correct. Maybe QNAP thought showing everything going on in the NAS wasn't a good idea? The more you show someone, the more they worry.

[l_costel]

Dear all,

I have a TS-253Be NAS with 2x HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 4TB in RAID 1.
I was a very happy user until the HDDs started what I consider BMS. From then, I lost my patience waiting for the noisy HDDs fo finish the BMS scan.
Restarting the NAS produced no result so I started to dig the forums in order to find out and than to shutdown the BMS.
So, I managed to install SmartmonTools v6.5.0 from qnapclub.eu and with the help of putty, I find out:

[~] # smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl 6.5 (build date Oct 22 2017) [x86_64-linux-4.2.8] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: HGST
Product: HUS726040ALE610
Revision: APGN
User Capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Physical block size: 4096 bytes
LU is fully provisioned
Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Logical Unit id: 0x5000cca269d0c204
Serial number: K7H5VU7L
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Wed Feb 6 22:11:30 2019 EET
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Current Drive Temperature: 0 C
Drive Trip Temperature: 0 C

Error Counter logging not supported


[GLTSD (Global Logging Target Save Disable) set. Enable Save with '-S on']
Device does not support Self Test logging

Well, It's obvious that my HDDs have smart capabilities but how can I manage to shutdown the BMS?
Maybe because of RAID 1, the result it's consistent? Anyway, I see only one HDD, and not the second one, too.

Please advise, I starting to believe it was a mistake using datacenter HDDs in a personal NAS!

Thanks in advance.

PS: Disk Health from Storage & Snapshots reports some SMART data but nothing related to BMS or Offline surface scan bla-bla...

[Don]

BMS?

I use those disks and they are quit. No constant activity. May your NAS is doing some kind of multimedia scan.

[dolbyman]

just use this tool

https://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Find_out_whi ... m_spindown

[P3R]

BMS?

Background Media Scan.

[l_costel]

Hi Don,

I just bought the NAS and started to copy data from various devices to it.
Indeed, this extremely annoying activity/noise starts after I transfer from my devices (nb, pc) a few hundreds GB of data (movies, games, pictures, etc).
Curious thing, no background activities are running (like the initial RAID build witch took a few hours, weeks ago) and the Dashboard shows 5% CPU and 56% RAM (2GB). SMART it's perfect. No VM or torrent activities... yet!
Indeed, the noise it's not a standard HDD activity/actuator working (I can clearly distinct the working sound when installing an app), it's more like a humming/brum one.
Just now the sound stopped, after a few hours. Silence is bliss! .
Indeed, I just played a little bit with the fan speed (max-min-stop) but I don't think the fan it's the problem.
Can it be a RAID activity that does not appear in the background activities?

[Don]

There is no background RAID activity.

[ChuckDavis666]

A few FYI's from the OP:

Turned out I didn't have a defective disk.

Net of remodeling our house, I am planning to move the NAS from my office (where I had become somewhat immune to the '"thunks and clunks") to a network shelf in a guest bedroom. I bit the bullet and replaced the HGST drives with WD Reds. MUCH quieter.

Does anybody want to buy three 5TB HGST drives? 7200 RPM and highest reliability according to Backblaze.

Something seems to have changed in QTS over the last several months. My NAS actually spins down (and stays spun down) fairly frequently.

[gtauser]

I had 4 TB Western Digital Red (not Pro, not Plus, just Red) drives that were perfect. They were quiet and would spin down. One of them developed bad sectors. So I went and bought Seagate IronWolf NAS 8 TB drives. They are very noisy. To top it off, they are always scanning / reading / doing stuff, and never spin down. It’s driving me nuts as it’s in my living room and bugs the family as we watch TV.

I will be going back to WD red drives. They lasted 7 years.

One of the Seagate drives already has issues with bad sector reallocation, after only 2 months, waiting on replacement from Seagate.

[Don]

@gtauser, please don't post to 6 year old topics.