Hard Drives: check before adding to build

[Mike77]

Hi,

I've got 6 additional WD Red's comming in today, which I'm going to add to my FreeNas. Seeing that this is a fair ammount of new hardware, I'd like to do this by the book. So what's the best way to check the drives before adding them to a Raid?

Edit:
I've just found a thread in the How To section ([How To] Hard Drive Burn-In Testing). I guess that the term Burn-In Testing is what applies here. In that post there is mention of using S.M.A.R.T. tests and so on. Can these be run from the FreeNas command line/shell?

 

[danb35]

Certainly those tests can be run from the shell in FreeNAS, as long as your system sees the disks.

 

[Mike77]

Excellent. Thanks.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Can these be run from the FreeNas command line/shell?

You can also run badblocks and SMART test from the command line of a separate Linux box if that's something you have available.

 

[Darren Myers]

Can also connect via SSH using putty or terminal on Mac.

 

[Mike77]

I connected through IPMI. At the moment it's running te SMART long tests. These should take aprox 8,5 hours. I must say that's a very long time. Is there a way to seeif the test finished correctly? Afther this, it wil be a badblocks tests. Can anyone tell me how long those wil take on WD Red 4TB drives?

 

[danb35]

Badblocks will take a few days to complete on those drives. You can check the results of the SMART tests by doing 'smartctl -a /dev/whatever'.

 

[Mike77]

Badblocks will take a few days to complete on those drives. You can check the results of the SMART tests by doing 'smartctl -a /dev/whatever'.

Thanks for your answer.

But is there a way I can see if the SMART test is finished, before checking the results?

And regarding badblocks I understand that it stops if the connection is broken. Is there a way to solve this? I'm running the tests from a Windows 10 machine running the IPMI of the above mentioned board. Sadly I can't really say that I can control when the Windows machine restarts. :-S

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Is there a way to seeif the test finished correctly?

When you check SMART status with the smartctl command, it tells you the percentage complete if a test is in progress, and the results of recent tests in any case.

Afther this, it wil be a badblocks tests. Can anyone tell me how long those wil take on WD Red 4TB drives?

Probably about 8x as long as an extended SMART test. The former is a single read pass, and the latter is four complete write and read passes (but you can change that with command line options).

 

[danb35]

And regarding badblocks I understand that it stops if the connection is broken. Is there a way to solve this?

Sure is--look into tmux. You can create a tmux session containing multiple shell instances, run badblocks on all your disks simultaneously, and then disconnect from that session while it continues to run.

 

[Mike77]

Used Tmux in the IPMI and even in the shell in FreeNas. For some reason I can only start 3 simultaneous shell instances. I need seven. Can anyone help me with this?

Second thing is that for some reason the enter key doesn't work in the shell from the FreeNas webgui. Is there a way to solve this?

 

[danb35]

Second thing is that for some reason the enter key doesn't work in the shell from the FreeNas webgui. Is there a way to solve this?

Yeah, don't use the shell in the web GUI. Sorry for kind of a flip answer, but it really is the best one--the web shell just isn't very good in a lot of ways. It's better than nothing, to be sure, but much worse than any decent terminal emulator with SSH client.

As to tmux, when I did it, I ran six drives at the same time, and put them into a two wide by three down grid, if that makes any sense. In tmux terminology, it was a single session, and a single window, with six panes.

 

[Mike77]

No problem. I'm just work with the system I've got. I understand that using putty or something would be better. But that would be learning another thing even before I've got my system running.

So now I'm looking at tmux and how to split the window. I wasn't aware that there were options, and missing the enter key wasn't helping. So how do I split the Window? I use a Crt-b " and then split it sideways?

Another thing happed during the badblocks run. At the beginning it says somthing like wrong IO ctl. Is that important? Do you still need to use sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=0x10 ?

 

[danb35]

I think, but am not sure, that the web GUI shell blocks some control characters, which may make using tmux much more difficult. It really is probably worth learning putty, bitvise, or some other SSH client before proceeding. In addition to unimpeded control characters, that will also give you scrollback capability, which will be very helpful.

To split, I'd first do Ctrl-B % to get the side-by-side split, then Ctrl-B o to go back to the left side, then Ctrl-B " a couple of times to get a few panes on the left, Ctrl-B o (repeated as necessary) to get back to the right half, then repeat the Ctrl-B " as necessary to get the panes there.

When running badblocks on FreeNAS, I also got the wrong ioctl message, but it then proceeded with no apparent problems. I wouldn't use the sysctl.

 

[Mike77]

I think, but am not sure, that the web GUI shell blocks some control characters, which may make using tmux much more difficult. It really is probably worth learning putty, bitvise, or some other SSH client before proceeding. In addition to unimpeded control characters, that will also give you scrollback capability, which will be very helpful.

To split, I'd first do Ctrl-B % to get the side-by-side split, then Ctrl-B o to go back to the left side, then Ctrl-B " a couple of times to get a few panes on the left, Ctrl-B o (repeated as necessary) to get back to the right half, then repeat the Ctrl-B " as necessary to get the panes there.

When running badblocks on FreeNAS, I also got the wrong ioctl message, but it then proceeded with no apparent problems. I wouldn't use the sysctl.

Thanks!!, I got it working (still using the GUI Shell). Looks working fine. All the drives are already past 10%. I used the commandbadblocks -ws /dev/da1 etc.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

All the drives are already past 10%.

... of the first pass of four.

 

[Mike77]

... of the first pass of four.

Jup.....

Badblocks finished last night. 7*4TB WD Red took over 73 hours. I'm goiing to start the second long SMART test right now. The first time that took over 10 hours.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

The first time that took over 10 hours.

Sounds about right. Each badblocks pass is a full disk write followed by a full disk read, i.e. the total should be very roughly 8x an extended SMART test, which is at minimum a full disk read.

 

[Mike77]

Guys, thanks for all your help. It's finally done, and there were no problems.