Steps after using spare?

[bluepill]

Hi, I am not incredibly familiar with NAS and ZFS so please forgive this, probably, very simple question. I am using FreeNAS (FreeNAS-11.3-U4.1) on some old hardware I had laying around. My raidz2 pool has 1 spare configured. A couple of the disks on the pool went offline because of read errors and FreeNAS automatically brought the spare online. I resolved the read errors and brought the offline disks back online, then scrubbed the pool. note: I am only using the FreeNAS web interface. After the pool status returned to finished (with 0 errors) I expected the spare to automatically return to being a spare. To my surprise it has remained online. I guess I need to do something manually. Can anyone advise how I can get the spare to be a spare again?

 

[jgreco]

The spare joined the pool and replaced one of the fail-y disks. At that point it is no longer a "spare". One of those fail-y disks should now be available to be a spare, but you might need to set it as one.

 

[bluepill]

Thanks for the reply. The only place I can do anything with the disks seems to be Storage/Pools/Pool Status. All the disks in the pool are online so I suppose I could use any of them as a spare now. Although I do notice that even though my spare is online, it is still listed in the group named "spare"; all the other disks are listed in a group named "RAIDZ2".

The only options I have for any of the disks is to either Offline, Replace or Remove. Should I remove a disk and then add it back to the pool as a spare?

 

[bluepill]

Thanks for the reply. The only place I can do anything with the disks seems to be Storage/Pools/Pool Status. All the disks in the pool are online so I suppose I could use any of them as a spare now. Although I do notice that even though my spare is online, it is still listed in the group named "spare"; all the other disks are listed in a group named "RAIDZ2".

The only options I have for any of the disks is to either Offline, Replace or Remove. Should I remove a disk and then add it back to the pool as a spare?

I just found how to query the pool status from the command line: using "zpool status". This reports the spare as AVAIL even though the web interface reports it as ONLINE. I assume this is a bug in the web interface and I don't really need to do any manual actions. Does anyone know if this is the case or is there something I need to do?

 

[JaimieV]

The 'zpool status' command line will be correct, I shouldn't worry about the UI which uses the slightly variant terminology.

Spare disks will fall back to being spare after they've done their duty, if the original damaged drive is 'replace'd and after resilvering completes.

Alternately you can 'detach' the damaged/dead drive and the spare will promote to full array member. Then you can add a new spare.