Greetings, another thread was posted about a Seagate hard drive that was constantly making a clicking noise when using OPNsense. I also experienced a similar problem with my OPNsense installation, I am using a laptop HDD by Western Digital. I previously did not have an issue with this same hardware when running pfSense.
What I discovered was that the HDD was constantly loading/unloading the head. Watching the SMART statistics on the HDD, I could see the load cycle count increase several hundred times in just a few minutes! This caused a massive amount of load/unload cycles on this disk.
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 111 111 000 Old_age Always - 267890
I was able to stop this activity by issuing the following command to disable APM within OPNsense:
camcontrol cmd ada0 -a "EF 85 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" - disables APM
I have rebooted the router since issuing this command and APM is still showing disabled. Hopefully this will help other people that may have a similar issue with extreme load/unload cycles on some HDDs. I had to SSH in to the OPNsense firewall and run these commands at the console. Is it possible to have an option to configure this in the GUI?
Just following up on this. The setting will survive a warm boot however, they are erased on a cold boot. These appear to be stored in memory on the HDD and shutting off power resets the HDD back. Is there a way to manually toggle this in the GUI so that it is set every time that OPNsense boots?
Tools exist for both Seagate and Western Digital drives to make these changes permanently, Seatools for Seagate and idle3 for WD