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Comment by naming_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the article title seemed kind of weird to me. I have a ZFS NAS, it's just a bunch of drives in an ATX case with (what I'd considered to nowadays be) the standard rubber grommets.

I mean, you can hear it, but it's mostly just the fans and drives spinning, it's not loud at all.

The recommendations seem reasonable but for noise? If it's noisy probably something is wrong I think.

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I totally understand the article title, I have a ZFS NAS that makes the same kind of noise as described there. Roughly every five seconds the drives make sound that is different from the background hum of a running computer. In a calm environment this is very distracting. I even had a guest sleeping in an adjacent room complain about it once.

This is likely a different problem than the article describes. Most newer hard drives will move the actuator arm back and forth every few seconds when the drive is inactive. It has to do with evenly distributing the lubrication on the arm to increase the life of the drive.

That's a tunable in ZFS.

vfs.zfs.txg.timeout defaults to 5 seconds, but it can be set (much) higher if you wish.

I don't care if I lose up to a minute or two of work instead of <=5 seconds in the face of an unplanned failure, so I set it to a couple of minutes on my desktop rig years ago and never looked back.

AFAIK there's also no harm in setting it both dynamically and randomly. I haven't tried it, but periodically setting vfs.zfs.txg.timeout to a random value between [say] 60 and 240 seconds should go a long ways towards making it easier to ignore by breaking up the regularity.

(Or: Quieter disks. Some of mine are very loud; some are very quiet. Same box, same pool, just different models.

Or: Put the disks somewhere else, away from the user and the sleeping guests.)

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