January 28, 201610 yr I have a 2TB drive that has been slowly growing pending sectors in the last month or so (up to about 200). Recently it redballed during a file integrity check. For the heck of it, I tried to rebuild the drive. The rebuild succeeded with zero errors and the pending sectors moved to reallocated sectors. Now, during the nightly mover job the drive redballed again. I have an fairly new empty 8TB drive that is already part of the array that passed preclear with flying colors. I would like to rebuild the failed 2TB disk to this 8TB disk... however its part of the array. Is there a safe process for essentially removing the 8TB disk from the array and reassigning it to the 2TB disk slot for a rebuild while my array is in an unprotected state? Also, do you think the drive is truly bad or could I have a cabling issue?
January 28, 201610 yr Community Expert AFAIK there’s no easy away, you could copy all data from the emulated disk to the 8tb disk, when all data is copied you can do a new config without the 2tb disk and rebuild parity. Pending sectors are not caused by bad cable, disk is failing.
January 28, 201610 yr You are confirming my reluctance to grow the array prematurely. I remember reducing the size of my array back in the V3/v4 days and i remember it being kinda painful. In newer systems I try not to add disks that i don't really need. I am in the process of migrating from v5 to v6 and decided to just build a new system for the effort to take advantage of the epic new virtualization features. In the end I'll have more physical drives than i'm going to need but i think that i'll keep them un-assigned until either something fails, or i need to grow. There is a spoiled little teenager in me who would love to throw all of the disks in there just to see the epic amount of free space, but... it's probably better to avoid getting to where you are now.
January 28, 201610 yr Author Well hard drive capacity has increased so much since I originally built my server and now I just buy 8TB drives. I really do not need to replace my physical 2TB drive with something else because I have plenty of space with this empty 8TB drive thats part of the array... I am just trying to figure out how to do this safely. So far johnnie.black's recommendation makes sense, but frankly I didn't even know you could do that. I will follow this guide: https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Shrink_array
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.