How often do people reboot their server?

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

I have run into an intermittent problem where drives become inaccessible at times. No matter weather it is one drive or five or more a simple reboot solves the issue. It seems to happen about once every two to four weeks and is always easily cleared up easily. A simple unplug/plug cycle fixes any drive (they are all USB) but said drive becomes inaccessible within a max of 30 minutes. 
But a reboot assures at least two weeks operation so I choose the reboot.

What i want to do is make a prophylactic reboot on some interval but my reading fins people recommending anywhere from bi-daily to monthly. I am leaning toward weekly simply because that is easy to remember. 
I can make it automatic by using Windows scheduled tasks but, before setting that up, I wanted to get a few opinions.

BTW: On my server I run DrivePool and the loss of drive access means that DrivePool becomes read only but I have NEVER, yet at least, had a stream interrupted due to on of the failures.

The computer passes all diagnostics and the only error that gets reported is DrivePool reporting a missing disk. 

The server has run steadily for as long as a month and it is protected by a UPS and all 14 drives are also so protected. I also have not had to do a full power down for months. 

I believe the actual problem is software related not directly hardware related. But i also believe, if periodic reboots keep the problem in check I do not need to do deep diagnostics to "find" the problem

15-20 years ago i might have decided to find the problem but, at my age, the pragmatic approach seems the best option unless this does turn out to be hardware related and gets worse. 

Fortunately DrivePool will send me an email if a drive goes missing so I do not often get surprised by a failure.  I thought about using the emails to trigger the restarts but that seems unnecessary at this point and could come when i do not want a reboot so prophylactic rebooting in less than the failure cycle length seems to be my best approach. 

That is unless someone wants to give me a server/storage setup that is plenty robust and handles 70 TB of storage. 
I will watch for the package with eager anticipation.    

[Scott D 69]

I had a similar experience not long ago.  I also had a similar set-up in that my storage was all on external hard drives (USB).  I was running a windows box and had around 7 multi-Tb drives attached.  On occasion a drive or two would just go offline.  I started by finding that unplugging and then reattaching the problematic drive would cure the problem.  Then it started happening on multiple drives at one time.  I too started doing a reboot of the windows box.  That got old quickly.

If I remember correctly, the problem turned out to be in the USB interface.  I can't remember if I added(replaced) the USB card in the computer or went to a USB hub, but one of those options seemed to correct my problem.  

I still run multiple external drives totaling around 56Tb but I am using a USB hub with power control for each individual connection.  In this way, I can turn off any particular drive to isolate problems.  Haven't had a problem in some time now.  Now I have Emby restart on an every other day just to keep the temp folder clean.  That seems to work well enough for me.

Hope this helps, or gives an idea on how to troubleshoot or isolate the problem.

Best of luck.

[jkramer 12]

I do a scheduled reboot every third day at 5am on a Win10 server, mostly for other reasons. Never have issues losing drives, and my occasionally wonky HDHomeRun doesn't disappear anymore, either. 12-13 year old box, USB drives are a bit wonky, so this is a must for me.

[KegTapper 8]

I was getting frequent missing drives for a while. I ended up swapping out a usb hub and haven't had an issue in quite a while.    I don't have a set reboot schedule, although I probably should. About once a week or so I reboot because cloudflared gets jammed up.

[TMCsw 249]

On 5/11/2024 at 7:51 PM, Gilgamesh_48 said:

I can make it automatic by using Windows scheduled tasks but, before setting that up, I wanted to get a few opinions.

If you don't want/can't debug the problem then...  Why not make it a daily scheduled event when you are asleep?  Since your the only client on the server?

The only downside I can see is if your Hdd's are set to sleep they will spin-up on reboot...

I only reboot (Linux) for major OS updates...

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

42 minutes ago, TMCsw said:

If you don't want/can't debug the problem then...  Why not make it a daily scheduled event when you are asleep?  Since your the only client on the server?

The only downside I can see is if your Hdd's are set to sleep they will spin-up on reboot...

I only reboot (Linux) for major OS updates...

While I could make it a daily event I do not really want to do that as I am rather old (76) and I intermittently wake up when I should normally be sleeping and one thing to do to put me back to sleep is watch a little TV. I am a bit better off making it an automatic weekly task as that males the odds lower that it will be rebooting during times that I want to watch. But that still is a bit more intrusive than I want.

I have mostly decided to reboot manually during times when I am watching something else like a sports event or a program on Prime or Paramount. 

That is not too hard for me, except for the remembering part,  as i can do it while watching other things from the comfort of my chair. I think making a manual time, once a week on weekends, to do the reboots. 

I just hope my mind remains fit enough for remembering tasks. I can schedule an Alexa reminder and use that to remind me to perform a reboot but that requires that I remember what the reminder is for and that I perform the reboot after getting reminded. If the reminder comes at a bad time and I do not reboot right away I might forget that I need to reboot. 

Oh well! No solution is perfect but that does not mean that perfection is impossible, just quite difficult. 

BTW: My computer is set so that no drive or the computer is allowed to sleep. The energy savings from sleeping is minimal and the disadvantages are high so I do not allow my computers to sleep. 

[JoLas 26]

Once a month.
I have a service window friday mornings 6 am where a scheduled script that runs a lot of other tasks, checks if there's a pending reboot from Windows Update and if there is the server will restart.
In practice I only see one reboot per month (usually the friday after the second tuesday of the month, patch tuesday in the Microsoft world).

I'm using a NAS for my storage and access the data using UNC-path
 

Edited May 17, 2024 by JoLarsson

[Cassiej444 0]

Every hour at the moment...its junk

[pgriffith 88]

Pretty much only when I have to due to an update requiring it. SUPER stable.

[Lessaj 467]

That's a lot of drives to connect via USB, most USB drive connectors are junk. Some present the actual drives to the operating system, some appear as individual USB devices with absolutely no reference to the drives connected to them. While convenient I don't trust them as far as I can throw them, I've seen them throw constant errors for a drive or all the drives (4 drive enclosure) that work without error in a different enclosure. An HBA would be much better suited to address that many drives and would likely result in higher throughput as well, though you'd probably need 2 of them depending on the model as I believe most have 2 SFF-8087 connectors and those typically only break out into 4 SATA each, and would need a case that supports holding that many drives. eSATA is also a decent option though I don't really have any experience with it, would need an enclosure that supports it. I've had months of uptime on my server before without a reboot, which is great for stability and uptime but definitely a bad security practice.

[tedfroop21 86]

2 hours ago, Lessaj said:

eSATA is also a decent option

The drive behaves just like an internal drive - it's (in my mind) the best option.   Because it behaves just like an internal drive.

However - power and power quality are a huge issue here too.  I would make sure to use some form of power filter or UPS. 

Wall warts that power external drives are prone to creating noise that is crazy difficult to track down as the noise affects different devices in the chain - not just the device in question, and tracking it down can take a lot of time and effort. (and a good VOM)

Which is why I favor devices like mediasonic drive enclosures or NAS devices as there are less points of failure and more robust power supplies.........

[Lessaj 467]

I have some experience with the mediasonic drive enclosures, they support both USB and eSATA. I think they're okay but you might still be gimping the performance of the drives because it's limited to the speed of the USB interface (if you use that option). I believe the eSATA connection should allow for a higher speeds but I think it's still going to be limited to SATA 6 Gb/s for the entire enclosure, and modern drives can do about 2 Gb/s + or - so you're still leaving some performance on the table for a 4 drive enclosure but that should be faster than USB. They basically do SATA port multiplication, which some SATA controllers don't even support.

I paid for the whole speedometer, I'm going to use the whole speedometer.