pfsense HD constant spin-up and spin down

aciampoli

I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this.

I have pfsense installed on a computer now for a few years, it's always been upgraded to the latest version/patch and same for packages.

A while ago I started hearing the HD make more noise then usual, it being a re-purposed HD figured it was going to die and purchased a new 5400 rpm 250GB seagate drive and reloaded my config after a re-install. After a few mins I could hear it making the same noise, after further investigation it seems that the drive spins-down and as soon as their is activity it spins-right back up and does does this over and over within seconds.

So after some googling, figured it might be APM/AAM spining down the drive, so ran these commands in the shell

camcontrol cmd ada0 -a "EF 85 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" - disable APM
camcontrol cmd ada0 -a "EF C2 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" - disable AAM
camcontrol standby ada0 -t 0 - disable standby
camcontrol idle ada0 -t 0 - disable idle

Now some of these are redundant as disabling APM and AAM should just do what I need it to do but I can still hear the drive spin down and up every so often.

I have done some testing and built a barebone pfsense and I don't have this issue, so something in my config is causing this.

Any info would be appreciated.
Thank you.

kiokoman

did you enable System / Advanced / Miscellaneous / Power D ?

aciampoli

Yes it is, all on adaptive. Forgot i did that as I was trying many diff things.

provels

FWIW, it may be a property of the HDD firmware (energy saving). Or not.

aciampoli

@provels yes i have considered this but the default install of pfsense did not have this issue.

chpalmer

at system_advanced_misc.php

bottom of page.. what is your HD standby time set to?

provels

@aciampoli Look on the bright side. Maybe it's finally dying! :)

stephenw10

Yeah you should be able to disable the spin-down as @chpalmer said above.

Or of you have a loud drive you can set /var and /tmp as ram drives. I've done that previously for exactly that reason and it leaves the drive spun-down almost all of the time. That's also a setting in Sys > Adv > Misc.

Steve

aciampoli

@chpalmer here is the section in system_advanced_misc.php
*$section->addInput(new Form_Select(
'harddiskstandby',
'Hard disk standby time',
$pconfig['harddiskstandby'],
['' => gettext("Always on")] + array_combine($opts, $vals)
))->setHelp('Puts the hard disk into standby mode when the selected number of minutes has elapsed since the last access.%1$s' .
'%2$sDo not set this for CF cards.%3$s', ' ', '', '');

$form->add($section);*

@stephenw10 any disadvantages in putting /var and /tmp in ram?

aciampoli

@stephenw10 made the changes to set /var and /tmp as ram drives, drive is still spinning up and down as we speak.

Adriano

provels

@aciampoli What is the make and model of drive? I have seen several WD drives with excessive head parking issues (as short as 8 seconds. WD Green/Red models come to mind.

stephenw10

@aciampoli
Hmm, and it did apply those? It rebooted?

You might have to removed the 'don't spin down' setting to allow it to spin down. Though in my case I did not.

You might have something else writing to the drive, maybe a Squid cache for example.

Steve

aciampoli

@provels seagate 500LM030-2E717D
@stephenw10 yes it applied and rebooted.

Rico

Can you please try another PSU?

-Rico

aciampoli

@Rico No I don't think changing the PSU will do anything as a default PfSense install doesn't give me this issue.

stephenw10

A clean install does not do this? Does it remain spin down or spun up?

What packages are you running?

Steve

aciampoli

@stephenw10 correct, for testing I did a clean install on this computer and let it sit there, I didn't hear any spin ups/downs, but I cannot say what state it was in up or down.
As for packages

Avahi
iperf
openvpn-client-export
pfBlockerNG-devel
Shellcmd

Currently the system is not in prod, and is sitting on my lan, no traffic is going through it except for me using ssh/web portal

stephenw10

Logging from pfBlocker is what I would suspect there then. Though I would have expected that to be in /var and hence in RAM if you enabled that.

Steve

chpalmer

@aciampoli said in pfsense HD constant spin-up and spin down:

@chpalmer here is the section in system_advanced_misc.php
$section->addInput(new Form_Select(
'harddiskstandby',
'Hard disk standby time',
$pconfig['harddiskstandby'],
['' => gettext("Always on")] + array_combine($opts, $vals)
))->setHelp('Puts the hard disk into standby mode when the selected number of minutes has elapsed since the last access.%1$s' .
'%2$sDo not set this for CF cards.%3$s', ' ', '', '');
$form->add($section);

Your install looks broken..

aciampoli

Update from my end, I think I figured it out...
After @chpalmer last msg, I went back to the "Hard disk standby time" settings and it was set to 180, which even if the systems was using the 180 mins it still didn't make any sense as to why is was spinning up/down so quickly. What I did is set it back to Always on and after saving and rebooting there are no more spin ups or downs.

thank you.