[Help] Constant thrashing on drives

[kerplatz]

This is the second day in a row that I woke up and found my NAS F4-423 unresponsive and several drives just thrashing like it did not have a brain any more. Nothing I do, but turn off the power to it, allows me to access the NAS. This can't be healthy for any drive to do this over the long haul whether it is mechanical or solid state. The bigger problem is that I have lost the ability to even access my NAS. Any ideas as to the cause? I am going to turn off the power once more and turn off all services except for SMB and and the others for windows drive access. I am also going to not have apps that access the NAS running in the back ground. That is just the beginning of my issues. Please help as I don't want to do this daily.

[kerplatz]

I want to update my post to mention that I do have the latest TOS 6.0 software running. Since I made this post, I believe I have most Windows programs that could access the NAS nut running. I still have access, but I think the constant thrashing of the DRIVES, of which I have 3 20 TB in a RAID 5 configuration, has been happening since I made the original post. I don't have much on the NAS. I have 2 Volumes. #1 is the NAS F4-423 and it uses 5.3 TB of 36 TB. Volume 2 is a D5-310 which is a RAID 5 and is uses about 300 GB of 8 TB. The D5-310 is connected to the F4-423 via USB and both are formatted with BTRFS. Since I have been writing this post, the NAS has been constantly accessing each drive. I suspect that some of it is normal RAID 5 activity. My fear is by tomorrow morning it will be in the unresponsive state and wildly thrashing the drives. Any help would be appreciated.

[TMzethar]

Based on the phenomenon you described, it seems to be caused by high load leading to system congestion. The specific cause cannot be pinpointed yet.
We suggest you send a system report to the support email for checking. It might help us understand the issue better.
Considering you don't have an SSD, your TOS is likely installed on 1-2 HDDs, which may make them harder to enter sleep mode. The relatively loud rotational noise could also be due to the HDD model or its inherent quality.
You can enable SSH/Telnet service in advance. When the problem occurs again, open Terminal and enter commands to check which process is causing the high-speed rotation at that time:

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watch -n 1 'ps -eo pid,ppid,cmd,%cpu,%mem --sort=-%cpu,-%mem |head -n 50'

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iostat 3

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pidstat -d 3

[kerplatz]

Thanks, I will do that. I do want to mention that I purchased high quality mechanical HD, they are WD RED Pro at $400 a pop. I don't think it is the hard drives themselves. Would it help to have a couple 1 TB M.2's installed for the OS, or does that even make sense.

If and when the hard drives thrash again, I will run those commands via SSH. Right now they are behaving normally.

[CursaYang]

You can consider installing a solid-state drive (SSD) and migrating the system to the SSD. Solid-state drives operate with significantly less noise. Additionally, when there are no processes or services running, an HDD can enter a sleep state.