Drive light constantly blinks for no apparent reason

[Murdock]

Hi.

One of my drive lights blinks constantly and I've been unable to find out why. When I boot the server, the blinking starts immediately, even during POST. The behavior will go on and off intermittently while FreeNAS is booting, then stop once the boot process has completed. The drive in question is an SSD in a simple pool with just two SSDs mirrored together. The only thing this pool is used for is to serve up some iSCSI targets for my XenServer host. The drive light will stay off until I start one of my VMs. The blinking will stay constant regardless of drive activity of the VMs (the drive light acts as expected with the other drive in the pool) and remain that way even if I shut all my VMs down.

I had a different problem with this same drive in that I was getting messages saying that the GPT table was corrupt or invalid. I offlined the disk, destroyed the GPT with gpart, wiped the disk, then resilvered it. I'm not getting that error anymore and the volume status page reports no errors of any kind.

As far as I can tell, the disk seems to work ok, but I can't help but wonder if there's some other problem that needs to be addressed. I've done a good bit of searching on the internet and can't find any solutions, so I'm a little flummoxed at this point. Have any of you seen this problem before?

Hardware:

Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X11SSH-LN4F-0
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1225 (Skylake)
RAM: Crucial 16GB (Model CT2K16G3ERSLD4160B) - 4 sticks for total of 64GB
Power Supply: Seasonic SS500-L2U (500 watt, Gold)
Case: Norco RPC-2212
Fans: Noctua NF-A8 PWM
Cabling: Norco C-SFF8087-4S

Drives:
Pool1: 6 x WD Red 4 TB 5400 RPM in RAID 10
Pool2: 2 x Samsung EVO 1 TB in RAID 1 (the problem child resides here)

Any insights you might have would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[m0nkey_]

What do the graphs for disk reporting look like for the drive?

 

[Murdock]

What do the graphs for disk reporting look like for the drive?

Like this. The problem drive is ada0, ada1 is the sister drive in the mirror.

 

[Stux]

Make sure you've got the latest firmware on the SSDs first

 

[Murdock]

I forgot to mention in the original post that I had updated the firmware on both drives in the pool. Sorry about that. Still no luck solving the problem...

 

[Stux]

And if you swap drive bays/ports/cables does the problem follow the drive?

 

[Murdock]

And if you swap drive bays/ports/cables does the problem follow the drive?

Yes, it does.

 

[Stux]

Yes, it does.

I've seen in the past that some drives display the inverted behaviour, ie, activity dims the light, and non-activitiy lights it. This is sometimes configurable with special drive setting tools. Unfortunately, I can't see why your Samsung EVO drive would be behaving like this. I would consider it perhaps a warranty issue?

 

[Murdock]

I've seen in the past that some drives display the inverted behaviour, ie, activity dims the light, and non-activitiy lights it. This is sometimes configurable with special drive setting tools. Unfortunately, I can't see why your Samsung EVO drive would be behaving like this. I would consider it perhaps a warranty issue?

The local HDD on my XenServer host does the inverted light thing you described, but doesn't bother me- I can still get an indication of the drive activity by looking at the light. No big deal. As for the Samsung drive, the Magician software that came with it doesn't have any functionality for changing detailed settings like that. I suppose contacting Samsung about this might be the next step.