Hot Spare, Replace Dead Drive, Move Hot Spare?

jmoschetti45

Cadet
Joined
Mar 19, 2020
Messages
5
Due to the physical layout of the server and jbod case I'm debating on putting FreeNAS on, I have a question about hot spare use. I'm a mdadm guy, first rodeo with FreeNAS....

vdevs would be 6x 6TB drives in RAIDZ2, with 8x vdevs in a pool. (4 neat vertical rows of 6 disks in the server/jbod....) Performance/redundancy this seems acceptable for what it's going to be doing. Also allows me to expand by 6x drives at a time when need arises.

Now, I've seen 2 approaches here:
1.) No hot spare, you just go replace a dead drive then resilver (Fine if you have 24/7 staffing there to deal with it asap I suppose)
2.) Hot spare connected so it automatically resilvers (Great if there's nobody there to deal with the problem (More of a realistic real-world case))

I like option 2, more idiot-proof. Due to the full use of all disk trays, I would consider 1 or 2 external drives as a hot spare. That part should be fine, but: Can I resilver again after replacing the failed internal drive, to free the hot spare back up as a hot spare? I realize this sort of goes against redundancy by putting the stress of another resilver on the array, but....
 

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
Moderator
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Messages
9,702
Top