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ReadyNAS fan speed spikes
I just recently got an RN428 unit for home use, and popped in some HDDs I had lying around for a test run with a small volume. So far, I only have 3 out of 8 bays filled, with total system temp remaining fairly constant around 42C. There is no data on the volume yet, and there are no apps running or anything. I have the fan profile set to balanced, with the fans running at around 1100 rpm.
However, every once in a while (every 10-20 minutes or so) the fan speeds would spike up to around 3200 rpm, making a whole lot of noise, for about a minute, before going down again to the normal speed.
So far, the only activity on the NAS is the building of the X-RAID volume (as stated earlier, no apps running, and no data being read/written). Could these speed spikes have something to do with the RAID volume being built, or is something else going on? I'm worried that if this keep happening, especially when I add more disks and the unit get warmer, this will happen more often, making the NAS unusable to me.
Please let me know if you know what's going on.
Ok, so I finally got my hands on some new drives, namely HGST Dekstar NAS 4TB drives. Plugged them in, and had the unit recreate the volume. So far (about 4 hour in) no random fan spikes anymore, and all drives report a realistic temperature arounf the 45C mark.
The conclusion seems to be that crappy old drives with faulty temp reporting will throw off the temp snesors and cause the fans to spike every once in a while. The problem doesn't appear to be something in the unit itself. Fan speeds also seem to increase with somewhat better incremental steps if the drives do get hotter.
13 Replies
Faustus wrote:
So far, the only activity on the NAS is the building of the X-RAID volume (as stated earlier, no apps running, and no data being read/written).
Well, data is being read/written to the disks (every block of every sector is either read or written when the volume is built. I'd wait and see if the spikes continue after the volume is built.
What disks are you using?
Faustus wrote:
I'm worried that if this keep happening, especially when I add more disks and the unit get warmer, this will happen more often, making the NAS unusable to me.
Are you worried about the temperatures? Or about the noise?
The NAS will be able to keep the disks at a reasonable temperature (mine are between 34 and 37C at the moment, and is also set to balanced). But the fan will come on from time to time, and it would be best to put the NAS in a location where that isn't a problem.
StephenBI'm using 1 WD Green diskc and 2 Barracudas, so far. More of those will be added as soon as I get my data migrated off my old NAS. As I say in my update, the spikes continue, although they seem generally farther apart than before.
I'm primarilty worried about the noise. I've never had a NAS be this noisy before. I'm running a 5-bay right now, which I practically can't hear even under load. However, this NAS, even running idle (or mostly idle) is making as much noise as a rackmounted unit.
What does your temperature graph look like? FWIW, here's mine (526x - using the balanced fan setting):
As you can see, the temps will vary depending on activity, and that of course will affect the fans. I upgraded two disks a week ago (and you can see the higher temps at the very beginning of the graph when the second one was resyncing). On May 13th I was running rsync to transfer about 3 TB of data to another NAS. The small daily spikes after that are when the daily backups run.
With little/no activity the fan runs at about 860 rpm.
Faustus wrote:
However, this NAS, even running idle (or mostly idle) is making as much noise as a rackmounted unit.
I can hear mine when the fan kicks into a higher speed, but it certainly doesn't sound like a rackmount unit. It's possible you have a defective fan - you could try contacting support via my.netgear.com.
Also - is the NAS in the same spot as the older one? You could try swapping them, just to see if the fan is inducing some vibration in whatever the NAS is on, or if there is some resonance/reflections off of nearby surfaces.
UPDATE: The volume finished building and I did an upgrade to 6.10 (including reboot). Still no apps running or data read/written. Fan spikes continue, although a little longer apart now (every 20-30 minutes, sometimes more often). Switching to quiet fan profile doesn't help.
This is still with only 3 out of 8 bays populated and no data activity on the disks.
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