Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

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Delgado
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Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Hello,
I bought the Asustor NAS AS6604T with the following disks.

2*12TB Seagate Ironwolf initialised as RAID1 and one
500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD initialised as volume 1.

Everything went smoothly.

Now I notice that one disk is regularly accessed although there is actually no activity. It is a short clacking noise every few seconds. It is intermittent.
I am concerned that one of the disks may have a defect, but Ironwolf Health Management says that everything is ok. Is this because ADM is always accessing it? How can I find out?

Otherwise, HDD Hibernation and S3 Sleep work without problems.
Do any of you have any ideas?
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orion
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Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by orion »

That surprises me. Did you find out which processes are working during idle (ADM web -> Settings -> Hardware -> Diagnostic tool)?
Delgado
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Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Is this possibly a problem of a missing SSD cache? The existing SSD is set up as a data volume. Is it possible that the RAID manager mdadm is causing the reads on the HDDs?
Is there a way to set up half of the SSD as a data volume and the other half of the SSD as a cache?
orion wrote: Did you find out which processes are working during idle (ADM web -> Settings -> Hardware -> Diagnostic tool)?
I will check this tonight.
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orion
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Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by orion »

Delgado wrote:Is this possibly a problem of a missing SSD cache? The existing SSD is set up as a data volume. Is it possible that the RAID manager mdadm is causing the reads on the HDDs?
Is there a way to set up half of the SSD as a data volume and the other half of the SSD as a cache?
I'm not sure why you think it could be a missing SSD cache?! The configuration that you specified above does not mention it?!
Why do you say "mdadm is causing the reads on the HDD"? Do you mean that your are creating volume and the task is still on-going?
When you created a volume on disk(s), ADM will occupy the whole disk(s). You cannot use portion of disk(s) as the other volume or cache.
Delgado
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Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

orion wrote:I'm not sure why you think it could be a missing SSD cache?! The configuration that you specified above does not mention it?!
That's right. The current SSD is set up as a data volume. I'm just wondering whether an additional SSD cache would prevent access to the HDD.
orion wrote:Why do you say "mdadm is causing the reads on the HDD"? Do you mean that your are creating volume and the task is still on-going?
The creation of RAID1 has been completed since Sunday. It's just a guess that mdadm might be the cause. The fact is, I don't know yet.

I will start the diagnostic tool this afternoon.
orion wrote:When you created a volume on disk(s), ADM will occupy the whole disk(s). You cannot use portion of disk(s) as the other volume or cache.
Thanks for the information. I was not sure.
Delgado
Posts: 64
Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Unfortunately, I haven't really found out much yet. The diagnostic tool doesn't really show much except this one entry (see the screenshot below). In the background, however, a hard disk access takes place every 10-20 seconds, which leaves no entry in the diagnostic tool. Not really helpful.
Image

In the activity monitor (see the screenshots below) I see that there are almost always read accesses on the first disk of RAID1 (always only 1kB read accesses). The second disk in RAID1 is completely quiet.
Image
Image

What can that be? Does anyone else have an idea how I can find out which process it is? Or maybe this is normal, which I somehow still can not really believe?

I am grateful for any support / help.
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orion
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Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by orion »

According to your pictures, it seems that you did not close web page during monitoring. As I know, ADM web page will access disks frequently to know system status. You should close ADM web page after you start diagnostic tool. After time expired, you can visit the same page to download diagnostic result.
Delgado
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Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Yes, you are right. I did not know that. I will repeat that this afternoon and then also log out from the web portal.
Delgado
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Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Here is a part of the log file created by the diagnostic tool.
The following processes continually access hard disks, preventing them from entering into hibernation. You can manually close these processes.
mdadm
index.cgi
lighttpd
logmand
java
btrfs-transacti
ps
iostat
sh
logrotate
Image

What is meant by Volume1?
Does it mean my SSD that I created as Volume1 or is it the first disk in the RAID1 array?
There are also accesses to the system volume. What is meant by this? Disk or SSD?

However, why Java is constantly accessing the disk is not clear. Is there any explanation for this? Why is there a Java process running at all?
JDownloader, which requires Java, is not active at this time.
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orion
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Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by orion »

?? You say "500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD initialised as volume 1", isn't it?
I think the problem is system volume. System volume is located onto every disk (one of partitions each disk). "Write access" should is the key. What's the time you started and ended the diagnostic tool? You can find out which processes access system volume (ps, iostate, sh). If those processes are triggered by you (access to ADM web or access NAS), there are no problems. If you don't know about them, I think you should pass this information to Asustor.
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