Questions about having HD as a standby in case of drive failure

[tmchow]

I have a few questions about having a drive sitting as a warm standby for when there is a drive failure.

 

1. Can the replacement drive be smaller than the one it's replacing provided it can fit the data that was on the failed drive?  I have 6TB drives mostly, but have a few good 3TB drives sitting around. Plan was to use these as a warm standby in case the 6TB ever fail.

 

2. What is the proper procedure for prepping the drives so I can get back up running as fast as possible when there is a drive failure?  I flirted with the idea of using these drives mounted outside the array, but changed my mind.  I have already used the preclear plugin to do a 2 pass preclear on them.  Wondering what I need to really do to get these drives ready?

 

3. Where can I find a list of the proper procedure to execute a drive replacement once there is a failure? 

[itimpi]

1. Can the replacement drive be smaller than the one it's replacing provided it can fit the data that was on the failed drive?  I have 6TB drives mostly, but have a few good 3TB drives sitting around. Plan was to use these as a warm standby in case the 6TB ever fail.

No.    The replacement process has no idea of files - it is simply working at the disk sector level and is not aware of what any sector is being used for.

 

2. What is the proper procedure for prepping the drives so I can get back up running as fast as possible when there is a drive failure?  I flirted with the idea of using these drives mounted outside the array, but changed my mind.  I have already used the preclear plugin to do a 2 pass preclear on them.  Wondering what I need to really do to get these drives ready?

Anything that gives you confidence that the drive is OK.  Preclear is a good candidate for this but is not required when doing replacements. During replacement the whole drive gets rewritten anyway so its existing contents are irrelevant.

 

3. Where can I find a list of the proper procedure to execute a drive replacement once there is a failure?

this is covered in the standard online documentation here