Disks

Clear the existing good drive and add it to the new zpool

In recent posts: Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data If you have a look over those posts, you’ll see why you never want to downsize a zpool. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 removing the zfs labels from an drive which was part of a zpool which is no longer in use destroying the […]

Clear the existing good drive and add it to the new zpool Read More »

Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data

As mentioned in Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD, I have a failing 5TB drive which is going to be replace by a 4TB drive. Only about 1.45TB are used, so there’s plenty of space to grow. If you get one thing from this post, don’t be downsizing zpools like this. I would have had much less work and opportunity for error, if I had returned that 4TB drive

Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data Read More »

x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive

I was up at 5:30 AM today. I packed the car and headed out. I arrived within the datacenter at about 8:15 or so. By 8:50, I was on IRC and the photos of the FreeBSD racks were uploading. Since I was going there anyway, I did some inventory and disposal work (a decommissioned server, about 25 old HDD, and various bits and pieces). I must say though, I’m not liking this option.

x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive Read More »

Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD

As foreshadowed in x8dtu – drive problems, I will be visiting a data center soon to replace a 4TB HDD. The replacement HDD arrived last night. It was unceremoniously tossed onto the front porch by the courier. However, it was properly packaged. I’m sure it’s fine. The original idea: put this drive into a host, and write some data to it, to exercise it a bit. As you will soon learn, that is

Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD Read More »

Adding in a stand-by spare drive for ZFS on FreeBSD

This is a follow up to Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD from two months ago. The replacement for the returned drive has arrived and after sitting for many weeks on my coffee table, it is installed in r730-03. Here it is, as found in /var/log/messages – this host is a Dell R730 which has drive cages allowing me to insert the drive without powering off the host. Jun 30 16:17:15

Adding in a stand-by spare drive for ZFS on FreeBSD Read More »

Making sure I remove the correct drive

Yesterday, I discovered I had removed the wrong drive from a zpool. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 Today, the zpool replace command has completed. Next, I carefully chose the right drive to pull from the drive bays. Status This is the zpool status, just before it completed: After it completed: I see gpt/SG_ZHZ16KEX is no longer in the zpool. Not trusting myself, I checked this way: [20:33 r730-03 dvl ~] % zpool status

Making sure I remove the correct drive Read More »

Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD

But first, there’s more Right after asking “Anyone running zfsd? Did you do anything in particular to configure it? I just added my first hot-spare to a zpool.”, ivy told me “noooooooo don’t use hot spares!! Keep a cold spare or at least an online device not attached to a pool. otherwise your zpool will randomly decide to attach its hot spare due to a temporary cabling issue or something like that. the

Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD Read More »

Playing around with a ‘failing’ drive

In zpool replace, you can read about a drive which was giving errors and which I replaced. At present, that drive is [still] giving these errors, but it not part of any spool. [17:38 r730-03 dvl ~] % tail /var/log/messages Dec 25 14:52:17 r730-03 smartd[15472]: Device: /dev/da6 [SAT], 18 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Dec 25 14:52:17 r730-03 smartd[15472]: Device: /dev/da6 [SAT], 18 Offline uncorrectable sectors Dec 25 15:22:17 r730-03 smartd[15472]: Device: /dev/da6 [SAT],

Playing around with a ‘failing’ drive Read More »

Adding another pair of drives to a zpool mirror on FreeBSD

Today, I’m ready to adding two recently obtained 12T spinning disks to r730-03. This host is the work-horse which houses all the main backups and database regression testing. It also hosts my newly-created but not yet-functional graylog jail. I will be following a previous post about adding drives because I don’t want to remember these things. They occur infrequently enough that documenting it is a good idea. In this post: FreeBSD 14 The

Adding another pair of drives to a zpool mirror on FreeBSD Read More »

Scroll to Top