Upgrade Raid1 disks

[Stux]

Just did some testing:

• created a pool with two disks in a mirror - call them A and B
• copied some data onto pool
• offlined disk B
• began zpool replace of disk B with a new disk C
• before resilver was complete, physically disconnected disk A

Reasonably enough, this left the pool faulted and locked.

I could not figure out a way to recover from here. Connecting only disk B gave no results for zpool import. Connecting A and B was no better. Connecting A and C, followed by zpool clear got the pool back, but after resilver, it was empty

Maybe photorec on B would be a recovery option.

If you split the pool, it would've worked, Ie b would've imported as a separate non-faulted pool to the original. I think that was why I queried if offlining was actually safe.

I think split should be in the GUI.

Not sure how this would affect a multi-vdev pool tho.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

If you split the pool, it would've worked

Yes, hence my follow-up post.

Not sure how this would affect a multi-vdev pool tho.

If each vdev is a 2-way mirror, you'd end up with two copies of the pool, each with no redundancy. You'd be in better shape if you started out by turning each vdev into a 3-way mirror, but that seems like overkill for growing a pool by replacing disks when you could just use the in-place replacement method. On the other hand, if the goal is to duplicate the pool, it seems like an interesting option.