Jump to content
  • 0

What is going on here?


Sonicmojo

Question

For the first time ever - I received this message from Scanner on a SEAGATE Ironwolf NAS drive that is about a year old:

ST4000VN008-2DR166 - 1 warnings

  • The head of this hard drive has parked 600,001 times. After 600,000 parking cycles the drive may be in danger of developing problems. Drives normally park their head when they are powered down and activate their head when they are powered back up. Excessive head parking can be caused by overzealous power management settings either in the Operating System or in the hard drive's firmware.

This drive (and 3 other identical ones) are part of my Windows Server 2016 file server which really sees very little action on a daily basis. What is the story with this message and why would this drive be "parking" Itself so frequently - considering the server is never powered down (only rebooted one per month following standard maintenance).

I have not had a chance to look into the other 3 drives yet - but this is concerning just the same. Is there a possibility that DrivePool or Scanner are the cause of this message?

Appreciate any info on this.

Cheers

Sonic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

Updated Data

I did some reading on the forum here and found this tidbit from a few years back:

In theory, the "Disk Control" option in StableBit Scanner is capable of doing this as well, and persistent after reboot. 

To do so:

  1. Right click on the disk in question
  2. Select "Disk Control"
  3. Uncheck "Advanced Power Management" 
  4. Hit "Set". 

I have enabled this on all my drives to see if the "parking" will settle down

But then I noticed that DrivePool was acting strange last night as well. It had begun an "Evacuation" of all the files from this specific drive - acting as if there was some sort of data emergency. When I checked into the server around dinner time last night - DP was displaying a message saying 63.5% Building data buckets (Or something similar) - it seems like it was hanging there forever.

So I hit Reset in Drivepool and let it run the inspection routines etc to confirm the pools and ensure the data was sound (it was). 

But when I went into server again this morning - I saw that my Balancers had been altered. The "disk space" balancer (at the top of the stack) had been disabled - leaving the Stablebit Scanner balancer next in line. I believe it's parameters took priority which some lead to the emergency evacuation action. I re-enabled the Disk Space Balancer and now ended up[ with this:

Any ideas what is going on?

Sonic

 

 

Disk Balance Off.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

It sounds like these two issues are unrelated.  

However, if the disk in question also seems to be causing weird behavior in general, it may be simplest to replace it. 

As for the evacuation, I'm not sure.  It is possible that StableBit Scanner detected unreadable sectors, as that would trigger this behavior. 

 

As for the "building bucket lists", this is a pre-execution task for balancing.  It can take a while, as it's basically determining where to move all of the files. 

 

Also, do you have any balancer plugins installed on the system? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
13 hours ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

It sounds like these two issues are unrelated.  

However, if the disk in question also seems to be causing weird behavior in general, it may be simplest to replace it. 

As for the evacuation, I'm not sure.  It is possible that StableBit Scanner detected unreadable sectors, as that would trigger this behavior. 

 

As for the "building bucket lists", this is a pre-execution task for balancing.  It can take a while, as it's basically determining where to move all of the files. 

 

Also, do you have any balancer plugins installed on the system? 

Chris

The disk checks out perfectly in Scanner. The only issue presented was this massively excessive "head parking" which looks like was being caused BY Scanner. All other SMART data is fine and I cannot see any evidence of anything else wrong with it.

Regarding the "evacuation" by Drivepool/Scanner - I did have a number of the built in balancers activated for a long time but have since cut it back to just two:

Disk Space EQ

image.png.94ec96df271ae787b6225115dc58cdcb.png

 

And StableBit Scanner - with a specific focus on ensuring my "unduplicated" files are being targeted - if there's a problem with a drive.

image.png.5a77f29c5c469e914846ef703dac540f.png

 

And here are my "balancing" settings:

image.png.65319373d99ea390bde3bc2eb0ac96a3.png

What is most concerning to me is that Scanner is NOT honoring the logic of moving "unduplicated" files away for "possible" problematic drives. In this case - here is the drive that exhibited the excessive head parking (But nothing  more) and now Scanner/Drivepool have filled this drive to max with unduped files - leaving me in a nasty state if something does happen here:

image.png.76426bfead4f87026b2aab6224f2aa53.png

Ideally - I need to see this drive looking more like the rest of the drives with a balance leaning more to "duplicated" files rather than not duplicated.

Any ideas with the balancers or balance settings that might make this even out a bit better. Also - this drive is less than a year old - and while I am certainly not saying that problems are not possible - Scanner is not indicating any issues that are obvious. I have also checked the drive extensively with Seagate tools and nothing negative is coming back from that toolset either. As of right now - this drive appears to be as normal as the other three - except for the ridiculous head parking count - which as of now looks to be driven by Scanner itself.

I have another server - running a pair of smaller 2TB Seagate drives (from the same series as the server above)- which have been up and running for a year and 4 months - and each drive has a load cycle count of 109 and 110 respectively. The 4x4TB drives in the server above have been running for just over a year and each drive has load cycle counts in 490000 range. The one drive that Scanner started reporting SMART issues with had a load cycle count of over 600000 before I shut it off.

Even Seagate themselves were shocked to see that load cycle number so high - indicating that all of these NAS drives should really never exceed 1000-2000 for the life of the drive. 

So I am not sure exactly what SCANNER is doing to one set of my drives and not the other - but it's a problem just the same. As I mentioned - my File Server (4x4TB) does not see a lot of action daily and anything it does see should be handled with ease by the OS. It is unfortunate that there is some sort of issue with the Advanced Power Management settings on Scanner for the File Server but even with APM enabled on the other server - there appears to be no issues with the Load Cycle or any other issue.

Appreciate any additional tips.

Cheers

Sonic.

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Answer this question...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...