Storage Pool Offline On Every Reboot

[Tommmm]

Hello Truenas community,

I have heard good things about the support here so I thought I would give it a shot.

I have a Dell 5810 workstation with default spec (Intel Xeon E5-1620 v3, 16GB of ECC RAM, storage options of ATA, AHCI, and RAID On, 6 sata ports)
Currently I am in AHCI mode as I have gathered that this is the best mode for my use case. I have 5 WD nas drives, 4 TB each. Attempting to do a Raid-z2. The main goal for me is redundancy.

I have gotten as far as creating a storage pool, creating a share, and successfully being able to map that share on a windows box. My trouble comes when I go to reboot the machine through either the CLI or through the shell. Once it boots back up, my pool shows as Offline. Attached is the zpool import command:

There is no data on the drives yet, so I have been recreating it each time, only to find out that every time it turns off or reboots the pool goes offline again. I understand there may be a way to import it again, but how can I fix the pool disappearing?

 

[NugentS]

1. How are you creating the pool?

 

[Tommmm]

1. How are you creating the pool?

With the pool manager. Here is how I do it:

 

[Alecmascot]

AHCI, and RAID On,

I would have expected that you would set RAID off ?

 

[NugentS]

@Alecmascot - oooo - good spot

 

[Tommmm]

I would have expected that you would set RAID off ?

No I was saying that "Raid on" is an option in the bios. Ahci is on

 

[Tommmm]

Hello everyone, here's something I noticed on my main console. It appears that my previous Dell raids (MyRaid and CameraRaid) from 4 of the 5 drives is still trying to do something? I thought if I wiped the drives it would disappear.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hello everyone, here's something I noticed on my main console. It appears that my previous Dell raids (MyRaid and CameraRaid) from 4 of the 5 drives is still trying to do something? I thought if I wiped the drives it would disappear. View attachment 64804

Just for clarity - "CameraRAID" and "MyRaid" are the names of hardware-based RAID volumes you created from a Dell RAID controller or through the Dell BIOS, and they're still trying to show up here in TrueNAS?

You might need to more aggressively wipe the disks if that's the case.

 

[ChrisRJ]

I have 5 WD nas drives, 4 TB each.

What exactly is the model number? WD sells "NAS drives" that are not proper NAS drives, i.e. they are SMR drives. If you have SMR drives you must replace them with CMR, since SMR does not work reliably with ZFS.

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

 

[Arwen]

I thought GEOM_RAID was FreeBSD software RAID:

19.5. Software RAID Devices

That is something we don't use today. In the early days, FreeBSD software RAID with UFS was an option for FreeNAS. Not any more. ZFS has all the features and more.

From those console readings, I would guess that the software RAID is rebuilding causing the disks to be un-available. It might even be corrupting your ZFS pool.

I don't understand how this setup is configured, as I don't know FreeBSD's software RAID. Thus, I can't help further.

 

[Tommmm]

Just for clarity - "CameraRAID" and "MyRaid" are the names of hardware-based RAID volumes you created from a Dell RAID controller or through the Dell BIOS, and they're still trying to show up here in TrueNAS?

You might need to more aggressively wipe the disks if that's the case.

Yes. From the console it looked like it was rebuilding them at the hardware level even when I wiped them. I put them back into the Dell's they came from and deleted the raid, then reinstalled them into the nas. All 4 of those drives were very hot--probably from the constant rebuilding.. It appears that doing that fixed the issue. I am a forehead.

 

[Tommmm]

What exactly is the model number? WD sells "NAS drives" that are not proper NAS drives, i.e. they are SMR drives. If you have SMR drives you must replace them with CMR, since SMR does not work reliably with ZFS.

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

WD40EFAX is the number... And you are right, it says SMR right in the title.... I've researched the topic you posed and am sad to say that it seems like SMR drives may not be the best fit for TrueNAS. I'm sort of beat down because i spent money on them thinking they were good 'NAS' drives. I think at this point I might just get a 12 tb drive to replicate to, if one of them happens to fail. Or just send them all back and exchange them for a few seagate ironwolfs with cmr... *sigh

I wish this wasn't a concern. I do care about the data being stored.

fyi--the issue turned out to be a previous hardware raid attached to the drives. It works now, but your comment about smr still lingers in my head.

 

[NugentS]

Those WD SMR drives are I am afraid a disaster. Can you send them back?
Failing that put them in landfill (basically do not use with ZFS)

 

[Arwen]

Glad you figured out the pre-built RAID issue and have that solved.


I understand your frustration with WD Red SMR drives. Western Digital snuck them into the NAS line and forever poisoning the Red line. Today, anyone using ZFS with WD Red drives must check the model for SMR, each and every purchase. While only some sizes in the Red line are SMR today, their is no guarantee that won't change.

Supposedly the WD Red Plus and Red Pro lines will remain CMR. But, once bitten, 10 times cautious.

 

[Tommmm]

Glad you figured out the pre-built RAID issue and have that solved.


I understand your frustration with WD Red SMR drives. Western Digital snuck them into the NAS line and forever poisoning the Red line. Today, anyone using ZFS with WD Red drives must check the model for SMR, each and every purchase. While only some sizes in the Red line are SMR today, their is no guarantee that won't change.

Supposedly the WD Red Plus and Red Pro lines will remain CMR. But, once bitten, 10 times cautious.

Is Seagate Ironwolfs any better? Says they are cmr.

 

[NugentS]

Seagate Ironwolf - nothing wrong with them.

 

[Tommmm]

Those WD SMR drives are I am afraid a disaster. Can you send them back?
Failing that put them in landfill (basically do not use with ZFS)

Well I am not sure they are THAT bad. Surely they would last a few years

Seagate Ironwolf - nothing wrong with them.

Hey thanks for your help in this. I think my window for returning the wd reds is still open--so i think i'll return them and get some ironwolfs with cmr.

Damn Western Digital... Why in the world would they sell 'nas' drives if they aren't good for nas applications?

 

[NugentS]

SMR, in particular from WD ARE that bad when it comes to ZFS

 

[ChrisRJ]

Is Seagate Ironwolfs any better? Says they are cmr.

You should also have a look at Seagate Exos, they are often cheaper than the Ironwolf line.

 

[Arwen]

Those WD SMR drives are I am afraid a disaster. Can you send them back?
Failing that put them in landfill (basically do not use with ZFS)

Well I am not sure they are THAT bad. Surely they would last a few years

Hey thanks for your help in this. I think my window for returning the wd reds is still open--so i think i'll return them and get some ironwolfs with cmr.

Damn Western Digital... Why in the world would they sell 'nas' drives if they aren't good for nas applications?

WD Reds that are SMR, (apparently not all sizes are SMR...), have 2 things that are wrong:

• They have a bug that ZFS can trigger causing read errors. It is not a real error in someways, but poor firmware that WD implemented on their SMR drives. This should not happen if the entire drive has been written. But, until then look out.
• During drive replacement, SMR drives can take so much longer than CMR drives, that it is possible for one to experience a failure because of the excessive time involved, (aka extra head movement & heat). Better have RAID-Z2 or 3 way Mirror, or plan for data loss.

The second more or less applies to any SMR drive, including ones from Seagate's Archive SMR line.

I mean, a week or more of re-silvering?
When a CMR drive would be a day or 2?


All that said, I own and use a Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive, used as a TrueNAS backup disk with ZFS. It works, but is slow to write, which is it's purpose, backups. Plus, I had to make certain I used an enclosure with fan cooling as it can get HOT otherwise. (At the time I bought it, their were no non-SMR 8TB disks available at a reasonable cost.)