I have 5 "empty" drives in my array; Can I use one of them to...

[mikeybunting]

Can I remove one of my 5 drives that are "empty" (they are assigned, but have no data on them) to replace another assigned disk in my array that is failing?

 

If so, how can I go about doing this?

 

Stop the array

Un-assign one of the "empty" drives

Assign empty drive to take the place of the failing disk?

 

Thank you!

 

running the latest rc15.....

[trurl]

What do you mean when you say it is failing? What do you base that on?

 

[Joe L.]

Can I remove one of my 5 drives that are "empty" (they are assigned, but have no data on them) to replace another assigned disk in my array that is failing?

No, you cannot do as you described.

 

You can replace a drive with another, but the replacement cannot be one of the disks already assigned to the array.  (And you cannot remove disks from the array when you intend to re-construct a failed drive)

 

Best you can do is copy all the data off of the "failed" drive onto one of the good drives.  Then, stop the array, un-assign the bad drive (since you now have a copy of its data on a good drive) and then set a new disk configuration. (immediately invalidating parity, and calculating it again on the smaller array when you next start the array)

 

Joe L.

[garycase]

As Joe noted, there's no simple way to remove a drive from an array => and when you do so by creating a new config, your parity will be invalid until it's recalculated.

 

Note that this means if your "failing drive" had actually failed, you could not do anything to resolve that until you had a new drive.    The best thing to do in that situation, from a data "safety" standpoint, is to turn off the array, and not turn it back on until you have a replacement drive.

 

But an even better thing to do is always keep a spare drive on hand ... you essentially had several spares, but you assigned them all to your array !!  In the future, don't do that