TerraMaster Forum

So, I made the mistake of changing a stable system (stable meaning, quiet, except under load) - silly me.

My problem and question(s):

I wanted TOS 6 installed only on the SSD, so I removed all HDDs before booting the NAS and completing the initialization. Installation on the SSD went fine. I then shut down the NAS, reinserted the HDDs, and created a storage pool. Initially, everything worked as expected - no HDD activity and quiet idle operation.

But after a few days, some data on the HDD pool, and three reboots, the HDD in bay 1 started making a constant "scraping" (?) noise, like the head is seeking every few seconds. It’s very annoying. Here’s an audio clip of the constant disk activity (You might need to turn up the volume a bit): http://www.sndup.net/krkwz - ignore the R2D2-style beeping, and stop around the 20-second mark to avoid loud MP3 compression artifacts!

Anyways... How can I ensure TOS 6 doesn’t copy system data to the HDDs after volume initialization? With TOS 5, keeping HDDs out during setup was enough. TOS 6 supposedly allows selecting only the SSD during installation, respecting that choice and creating partitions only on the SSD - unlike TOS 5, which ignored it. Does TOS 6 actually honor this? Are there any other tricks? Like disconnecting HDDs before clicking “Install TOS”? I’ve also read you can delete partition data (but not the partitions) on a PC, though that might cause issues, I'd assume?

EDIT: The drive isn’t failing, by the way. What I’m saying is that there’s constant activity on the HDD, and I want to prevent that - just like it was possible in TOS 5, where you could force the system to use only the SSD (with some workarounds), even if TOS partitions existed on all the drives.

I'm very sorry for the trouble you have caused.
In TOS 6, it is allowed to create a system in multiple hard disks for some redundancy.
Based on your description, it is suspected that the hard disk was rebuilt and synchronized after the restart, but it still needs to be confirmed. Please collect a system report and send it to our technical support email, and attach a link to this post. We will analyze the situation.

CursaYang wrote: ↑16 May 2025, 22:40

Thanks for your response!

Could you please first confirm whether it’s actually possible to avoid having OS redundancy partitions on the HDDs altogether?
I want all OS activity to take place exclusively on the SSD, with no access to or activity on the HDDs - aside from regular storage access, of course. Is there a way to achieve this?

As far as I know, this wasn’t possible under TOS 5. However, I thought TOS 6 introduced the ability to designate a specific system drive for the OS installation - meaning the OS wouldn’t be installed on any other drives. Is that correct?

Thanks again!

F4423 wrote: ↑16 May 2025, 23:12 meaning the OS wouldn’t be installed on any other drives. Is that correct?

Not exactly.
All the drives will be partitioned in the same manner, but only the selected drives will be added to the active operating system raid1 mirror - which may, of course, only be a single disk if that is what is selected. This action ensures that the data partitions are correctly set out in the (virtual) arrays (ie, they start at the same offset).
This arrangement is logical and essential, especially since now we are being given choices of where the operating system may be set out.
If nothing ever accesses the nas, data drives will sleep. As soon as the nas is accessed data drives will, naturally, be woken up as has been stated previously by @TMsupport. System Hibernation is not a feature of TOS.

Gremlin wrote: ↑17 May 2025, 04:55

Okay, thanks for the explanation!

So, without any workarounds, it's probably not possible to achieve completely silent operation of HDDs, and the periodic scraping/ticking sound I shared in the audio recording in the original post is unavoidable under normal circumstances?

I don't remember exactly how, but I managed to achieve silent operation under TOS 5.
If I recall correctly, it involved starting the initialization process and, before clicking "Install TOS," disconnecting the HDDs. I then reconnected them after the installation was complete. This way, the OS partitions were created on the HDDs, but I assume no data was written to them - resulting in no persistent periodic HDD noise, as described in the original post.

Are there any known workarounds to achieve the same result under TOS 6?
I understand this would effectively result in a less secure system if something were to happen to the SSD, but I’m willing to accept that risk.

Someone on the forum mentioned that it might be possible to simply delete the data from the partitions created on the HDDs - without deleting the partitions themselves - but I haven’t seen anyone confirm or test this approach.

Cheers!

If you have installed the system on only one hard drive and have not created any arrays, the system partition will not be copied to other hard drives. If there is an existing system partition on the hard drive, you can contact us for manual deletion.