Data Recovery

[HANDLEric]

I'm worried that something in the firmware kicked it into a read-only/premature fail state as a "safety measure."

Just as something to try I went ahead and upgraded the firmware on all 6 drives as there was a new version out there but no change unfortunately.

 

[Arwen]

One feature of SCSI, (used by SAS drives for command, control and data), is that they can be "reserved" to a specific host. I don't remember all the details but it is commonly used by HA pairs with shared access to the drives. If one side dies, the other must understand this "reservation", and take over. I don't know why 2 of your disks might have this and not the rest. Or even why 2 at all.

Here is a link to a good description and how to manage this in Linux:
The Geek Diary - Understanding Linux SCSI Reservation

I am not sure this is the issue, as the error message should have been similar to below, which is Linux. However, perhaps FreeBSD does not support SCSI Reservations, (unlikely).
[6902380.609007] sd 11:0:0:1: reservation conflict

 

[HANDLEric]

Looks like it's just having trouble opening that initial drive so i'm assuming whatever happened must have corrupted the drive to some degree?

 

[HANDLEric]

Follow up question: Does anyone have any real world experience with how much of a performance difference there would be on RaidZ2 vs 3? This array hosts iSCSI storage for a small virtualization environment (~50 VMs) none of which I would consider to be incredibly I/O intensive. With 7 drives in the shelf we will either go 6 active drives in RaidZ2 with a spare or all 7 drives in a RaidZ3 pool.

 

[Heracles]

performance difference there would be on RaidZ2 vs 3?

Not much. The performance is much much more related to the number of vDevs your pool has. With RaidZ2 or 3, you will almost surely have the same number of vDevs in either case. As such, do not expect any significant difference between the two.

It is usually considered that a RaidZ-1/2/3 vDev has the performance of a single drive.

If you need more performance, you should go with mirrors.