TrueNAS keeps crashing every 5 days

Long story short, I built a TrueNAS for extra storage for my house hold out of an old PC. About every 5 days the server will just lock up and will need to be rested. I looked up to see if there was a scheduler that I can set it to reset the server early in the morning but I could not find anything like that. This is the specs of the NAS.

Storage: (2 x 4TB) WD Red Pro in RAID 1 (New)
Boot drive: (WD Blue NVMe PCIe 3.0 256GB) (New)
Motherboard: ASRock X370 Taichi (old) BIOS 5.60
CPU: Ryzen 1500X (old)
RAM: (2 x 8GB) G.Skill Trident Z 3400MHz clocked to 2133 MHz (was old but RMA due to one of the sticks going bad this year so new kit)
PSU: 500W(?) Antec(?) (I’m not sure I pulled it out of an PC that was built in 2005(?) and cleaned it)
GPU: Nvidia GT 7600? (Was only used to have some kind of display out, came out of the same old PC) (Low power card that just needs power from the PCIe slot)

My personal best guess is that I’m not using ECC memory and I don’t want to put more money into this system. I looked up to see if my motherboard and CPU can support ECC and on the surface it does but it seems to be very picky on which ECC memory I can use.

I don’t think it is the power supply because it is a very low power PC but I could be wrong. I haven’t tried removing the GPU after the initial install of TrueNAS.

TrueNAS is pretty stock and right now only being used for storage and nothing else.

Any tips on how to keep it from locking up would be helpful. In reality it isn’t that bad but would be nice if it didn’t lock up at all.

What do the logs say?

Likely not the problem.

2 Likes

truenas.local had an unscheduled system reboot. The operating system successfully came back online at Wed Apr 13 12:35:16 2022.

2022-04-13 12:35:16 PM (America/New_York)

That is all I see. In the notifications icon. I have a hard time finding a actual log for this.

I found the shell command to view the log, it seems like It only went to the boot up after I hit the reset switch on the 13th, I guess I will have to wait till it does it again. Thank you for the suggestion about logs. I will keep an eye out on it next time it does this.

1 Like

Yeah, you want to see what the log says around the time of an incident. There’s a chance a freeze will be so severe that nothing will be logged, but that is usually not the case.

1 Like

I had similar symptoms on a previous build and the root cause was a failing boot drive. Result was a hard lock after a week, but also failing SMB shares were the first symptom.

I now always mirror my boot drive and so far the same hardware (mobo CPU and ram reused) is stable.

Try a different power supply.

17 years old is pushing it a bit, especially if your logs are giving no other indications of what is causing the problem. Low power usage might actually be part of the issue as I seem to recall some of the low power states (which came in since 2005…) could cause problems with old power supplies - here’s an example of one article on the subject from 9 years ago:

Also, generally, it’s the part you don’t think can be the problem that always is the problem :wink:

I remember some years ago a laptop I’d decided had a dead board, only realised it was a bad RAM stick when I tried to transfer that RAM to another system…

3 Likes

ECC RAM is nice, but shouldn’t be causing you any issues.

Something helpful is to go to System - Advanced and display the console output, may be it burps something out just before shutting down.

I’m personally not a fan in using non Intel CPU’s for TrueNAS, it probably works in most cases, but I like to give a build the best chance of success and reliability.

Just in order of time/cost/hassle:

It’s a nice board though (Intel NIC), may be try to turn off as much as you can in the UEFI, such as wifi, audio, etc.

Oh, you could double check the board isn’t trying to auto-overclock or fiddle around with timings.

Spending money (I know you don’t want to):

I’d may be replace the parts that can be re-used in another system, such as the UPS, getting a good one is an equally wise investment.

I’m wondering about the NVME - the NAND versions are known not to work well with TrueNAS. I slightly reach for that as I have a TrueNAS build with a MP500 NVME drive in it within the last few days and it’s throwing up a ton of errors, so I’ve replaced it with an Intel SSD.

A UPS would be a very wise investment, I have one that’s very TrueNAS friendly. That’s a unit that you can use for more than one machine (perhaps).

Do let me know how you get on. :+1:

1 Like

Is freenas up to date? this is real dated, but around the time the 1xxx series ryzens came out, the BSD kernel that freenas/truenas used did not support them at all and would randomly hard lock the system. iirc if you had a screen connected it would throw something about a watchdog timer right before it would freeze, but there wouldnt be any logs.

I doubt this is still a problem, since the last time i looked it up people no longer were having that issue, but i figure i would throw it out there

I replaced the motherboard because it just died. The system kept crashing ever other day until I updated to TrueNAS 13.0 Core and now it has been up for 9 days and not crashed once. Thank you for you help I think it might been a combination of a bad motherboard and something buggy TrueNAS 12.0.

1 Like