Lost all data with only one HDD failure

[Sizene]

Hi all,

I am quite new to FreeNAS but already quite fond of it. I have built a new system, 6X 4TB HDDs into Z1 and ended up with about 16.x TB. this setup worked ok for few weeks, then I added a new RAID card (LSI 9650SE-24M8) with 4 x 2TB HDD on top the six drives.

I configured the RAID card as JBOD and added the 4 drives as Z1 again, but instead of adding a new data storage pool I expanded the existing pool with this new HDDs. All seemed working fine for few hours.

I wanted to test/simulate HDD failure and see if/how FreeNAS can recover from a single HDD failure, I shut down the system and removed one drive from the RAID card and powered the PC back up.

To my suprise it did not boot up anymore. I mean it boots up but I can not access the FreeNAS interface anymore. The BIOS is recognising the RAID card and if I go into the RAID card BIOS I can see all 4 HDDs.

If I remove the RAID card and the 4x 2TB HDDs FreenNAS boots up and i can access the interface, but the data pool is not there and can not get anything to work. I am new and I accept i may have done something wrong, I am suprised though a single HDD failure (although caused by me as a test) can cause such a meyhem. In any case I am lookig for some help please? Let me know if you need any logs I will try to collect them and post them here.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[ian351c]

If I read you right, you ended up with 2 vdevs: a 6x4TB Z1 vdev and a 4x2TB Z1 vdev? You then added the second vdev to the pool that the first vdev was in? If that's the case, it should have worked as you were expecting (pull 1 disk and everything is OK).

If you added the 4 2TB disks, 1 at a time, to the existing pool, then what you ended up with would be 5 vdevs: a 6x4TB Z1 vdev and four 1x2TB single disk vdevs. This would result in no redundancy for the pool if you pull any of the 2TB drives.

Just in case you haven't seen them, I highly recommend these two posts:
Cyberjock's Guide to ZFS
Cyberjocks's RAID5/RAIDZ1 is Dead

 

[Ericloewe]

What's the output of zpool status? Please use code tags or pastebin (the formatting is crucial).

Hopefully, it'll tell us what the pool layout is/was.

 

[cyberjock]

So you say that you set the card as JBOD. Do you mean you created individual RAID arrays for each disk?

Can you post the other hardware in your server?

Thanks.