Hard Drive noise on Time Machine

What I'd do is to perform a stress test on one of the drives and see if makes the same noise. We can't really say that the sound is normal since we did not hear it first hand.

I will do a test with WD lifeguard later today and post some results. The thing that bugs me is that Time Machine produces lots of noise to copy around 500MB of data, and when copying large files (> 2GB) over SMB, it is quiet.

Thanks.

Disk write caching can help reduce seeking because it gives the drive a chance to produce a better write sequence. We had an option for this in os4 but I don't see it in os6. You need to have a UPS though to be safe. I can't get to my machine at the moment to run a command to check if it is enabled automatically when a UPS is detected, but I suspect they just took it out to avoid people making the mistake of enabling it without a UPS in place. There are hdparm commands you can issue manually to enable it. You also might get a small improvement from running the defrag job.

Doing an extensive test on WD lifeguard, the RED drive is behaving as normal, really silent.
Defraged it on ReadyNas, triggered new time machine backup, and again, lots of noise, as you can hear in the video :(

There are a lot of files in those Time Machine backup directories so if Apple accesses files based on some ordering scheme of their own it will cause a lot of seeks when reading what is there. Adding a second drive might divide the seeks over two disks and help with this. (the 102 must take 2 drives, right?) If you are willing you could just put the WD drive back in and let it sync (you'll lose whatever was on it).

The only other thing i can think of is maybe there is something wrong with your timemachine backup that is causing Apple to revalidate everything at each backup. You might try a new timemachine backup. I doubt this is it, but it's also not that hard to try.

steve

Happened to be sitting by my pro6 when my daughters macbook did a backup a few minutes ago. My system has 4 disks in it. I could hear it. It wasn't as loud as your video, but it was noticeable. I really think there is nothing functionally wrong with your setup, it's just the disk access pattern of apple backup.

I did check and write caching is NOT on for my disks. I can't find that option in the OS6 UI. I do have a UPS.

mgdm if you are reading this is there an issue with enabling write caching? Or was it just removed because people were using it without a UPS? I went ahead and enabled it, I'll trigger an apple backup later today and see if I can detect a difference.

steve

How can I enable write caching in my readynas? I have it plugged to a UPS, I guess it should not bring me trouble.

*Update
I was checking hdparm, and I think it is already enabled by default

root@NETGEAR_NAS:~# hdparm -I  /dev/sda | grep cache
	cache/buffer size  = unknown
	   *	Write cache

Try "hdparm -W /dev/sda" to see if it is actually enabled.

"hdparm -W1 /dev/sda" should enable it. You need to do this for every disk.

steve

The backup drive noise sounds like when using a very fragmented hard drive.

But my drives are new WD Red 4GB drives.

Doing backup using an old Synology DS214+ NAS (which the RN102 is supposed to replace) it does not move heads this much.