Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

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Delgado
Posts: 64
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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:?? You say "500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD initialised as volume 1", isn't it?
Hi orion,
no, no, that is correct. Volume 1 is the SSD and Volume 2 is the RAID1 volume consisting of 2 disks (Seagate Ironwolf 12TB). I did not know that the system volume is a partition on all disks. That's why I got confused.

I investigated the behavior further and found that unfortunately the diagnostic tool is no real help. I made a recording again and I don't see any hard disk activity in the logging between 5.08 pm and 5.59 pm (see the screenshot below). Nevertheless, an access every 10 or 20 sec. can be heard on both hard disks (RAID1).

Image

I then removed both hard disks one after the other and connected them to my Windows PC. After about 2 minutes there was absolute silence on both hard disks. There were no more accesses. I then used Seatools (Seagate's diagnostic program for Windows) to run all the simple tests on both hard drives. Both hard disks are in order.

Therefore, the accesses must be from Asustor and are apparently not logged by the diagnostic tool. Are there any other ways to find out who is causing these accesses?

I appreciate any help/support.
Delgado
Posts: 64
Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Sorry,
for the many questions, because I noticed something else and I can not assess whether it might have something to do with the accesses to the hard disk.

I have the mdadm status displayed on the console with the command 'cat /proc/mdstat' and notice that there are two degraded arrays displayed (see screenshot below). But on the web interface everything is ok (see screenshot below).

Can I somehow remove these entries marked with [U_] without losing data? Could this be the cause for continuous write accesses (10-20 sec.)?
Image
Image
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orion
Posts: 3482
Joined: Wed May 29, 2013 11:09 am

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by orion »

Delgado wrote: I then removed both hard disks one after the other and connected them to my Windows PC. After about 2 minutes there was absolute silence on both hard disks. There were no more accesses. I then used Seatools (Seagate's diagnostic program for Windows) to run all the simple tests on both hard drives. Both hard disks are in order.

Therefore, the accesses must be from Asustor and are apparently not logged by the diagnostic tool. Are there any other ways to find out who is causing these accesses?
mm... Then, I don't know what's the possible case. I think you should provide full information to asustor directly. They should be able to find out what's the problem.

The console screen (cat /proc/mdstat) shows that md0 and md126 are located onto your NVMe device. ADM is actually stored onto those devices. It's new for me to learn that ADM is not mirrored to HDDs in this case!! :o Anyway, it looks normal because you plug only one NVMe device to your NAS. So the 2 pictures show consistence. Your data volume in HDDs is not in degraded mode.
Delgado
Posts: 64
Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

@orion
Thanks for your help. Then I will contact the ASUS support and hope that the support can help me.
AndyM
Posts: 94
Joined: Fri Nov 13, 2020 11:57 am

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by AndyM »

I have the same unit with 2 10 tb seagates; SSD's set up as cache and have the same issue - the drives always seems to be calling home every 30 sec or so. I will be most interested in anything you find out.

Cheers
Andy
Delgado
Posts: 64
Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Hello all,
after some ticket correspondence between the Asus support and me, it finally came out that this is indeed a normal behavior.

Ultimately, the cause lies in two daemons that are active in the background

a.) /usr/sbin/emboardmand, a customized Asus component that manages the HW and the system raid.
b.) /usr/sbin/watchmand is like a watchdog making sure that the emboardmand is running without getting stuck.

If I terminate both processes from the console with

'/etc/init.d/S93emboardmand stop' and
'/etc/init.d/S99watchmand stop'

and wait for about 2 minutes then both disks are completely silent. Since this takes about 2 minutes, I assume that the FW of the disks is still accessing them until it stops.

However, the stopped processes/daemons are automatically restarted at night. I think that both processes are in the cronjob table. Therefore stopping the processes is not permanent. The automatic start of the processes could be avoided if the device is in S3 sleep at night. However, I would guess that booting to WOL would start both processes again. There is also the question whether it is at all good for the system if both processes are permanently stopped. I think not.

Anyway, this is the cause for me. Unfortunately, there is no real workaround. I have asked to change it or make it configurable as a suggested improvement for future ADM versions.

I can live with it now, because I know that the disk accesses are controlled by the ADM and that is not a defect of the disks.

And, I can still hope that Asus may provide a workaround in a future ADM version. I think, every 10-20 seconds must not be accessed to disks.
Delgado
Posts: 64
Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:52 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Delgado »

Support just told me that the behavior should be fixed in the next ADM version.

I am waiting and looking forward to the next ADM version.
trailpixie
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Apr 25, 2021 3:07 am

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by trailpixie »

Mine is doing something similar, but it is the ufraw-batch and convert processes that are sucking up all the processor and hard drive time. I have been experimenting with Photoprism that used ffmpeg and some other raw processor stuff in the background, so I don't know if it left something behind, but I have killed those process through the GUI.

Nonetheless, it can't be good for the system to have hard drives spinning for weeks with the system never going to sleep. The only option I have is to manually shut the system down. At that point, there isn't any point in having a NAS.
AndyM
Posts: 94
Joined: Fri Nov 13, 2020 11:57 am

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by AndyM »

Delgado

Great news if they can quiet the disks to a minimum - nice to see a response on this.

Thanks a lot
Andy
Mondas
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2020 9:33 pm

Re: Hard disk accesses although no external activity is present

Post by Mondas »

Is this fix in ADM 3.5.6 which was just released, does anyone know? Thanks...
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