What i did wrong? (drive swapping for bigger)

[madik]

Hey guys. I had a problems with drive swapping. I created a 5 drives RaidZ1 with 3x 3TB and 2x 2TB drives. The use of smaller drives was just temporarily for date transferring from my PC to NAS.

Anyways when i moved all the data from PC i went to the process of swapping 2TB drives for 3TB which were in my PC, one by one with the silvering process each time i swap one drive.

I looked up the sections that describing procedure for replacing drives in the Documentation. Specifically this for encrypted pools:

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes#Replacing_a_Failed_Drive_in_an_Encrypted_Pool

I followed all the steps until I inserted a 3TB hdd instead of the manually removed 2TB drive. Hot swapped but my case and motherboard is supporing it.. When I inserted the bigger drive FreeNAS stopped responding and only thing I could've done was restarting the machine. But after the restart the web gui was still inaccessible. So only thing i could've done in that time with my limited knowledge was to put FreeNAS into factory reset from the console. After the reseting process FreeNAS was obviously working nad I Auto-Imported my Pool without problems and silvered the pool with newly added 3TB drive.

Because I needed to also swap the 2nd 2TB drive i did everything in the same way and YES it crashed again. Though it was just some random bug. Then i made the same steps and resilvered the pool to the full volume.

My question is: Did I something wrong? Any idea why FreeNAS crashed when i inserted new hot swappable drive?

I think that If I would've shut down the system and swap drivers it would've probably worked out without an issue. Who knows..

Sorry for the long story.

 

[dlavigne]

How much RAM in the system?

 

[madik]

How much RAM in the system?

viz my signature. 16GB

 

[joeschmuck]

Well there are a few things here that can be looked at:
1) Your hot swap capability isn't very capable.
2) FreeNAS has a bug when replacing encrypted drives that are being hot swapped.

I would venture to the first one listed as the likely issue however I feel that you should submit a bug report and give as much detail as possible. Maybe the problem can be recreated and it's not just limited to your system.

How are the drives mounted? Are they in replaceable drive carrier/cages or are you manually disconnecting the power and data cables? If the latter, which order are you plugging the cables back in? I don't think it makes a big difference but I'd plug in the SATA cable first and then the power cable.

In the future, for your system I would shut it down between each drive swap.

 

[Sir.Robin]

Could be power related too. Connecting a drive hot, can lead to a temporary (short) power drop for other drives connected to the same power rail/cable. And so you suddenly have multiple drives offline and freenas freaks out. :)

This happened to me and so i would cold swap the drives.

Sent from my mobile using Tapatalk

 

[madik]

Well there are a few things here that can be looked at:
1) Your hot swap capability isn't very capable.
2) FreeNAS has a bug when replacing encrypted drives that are being hot swapped.

I would venture to the first one listed as the likely issue however I feel that you should submit a bug report and give as much detail as possible. Maybe the problem can be recreated and it's not just limited to your system.

How are the drives mounted? Are they in replaceable drive carrier/cages or are you manually disconnecting the power and data cables? If the latter, which order are you plugging the cables back in? I don't think it makes a big difference but I'd plug in the SATA cable first and then the power cable.

In the future, for your system I would shut it down between each drive swap.

1) I have Lian Li PC-Q25 with 5x hot swap cages. It can still be some problem with MB/bios or whatever but on the paper it should work. And hot plug is turned on in the bios.
2) Thats probably the problem

I will look into the ticket system (never report anything before) and perhaps create one.

What is the most robust backup of the FreeNAS system that can be easily restored in case of system crash? I will be able to recreate the situation but i dont want to risk another reinstallation of freenas.

 

[madik]

Could be power related too. Connecting a drive hot, can lead to a temporary (short) power drop for other drives connected to the same power rail/cable. And so you suddenly have multiple drives offline and freenas freaks out. :)

This happened to me and so i would cold swap the drives.

Sent from my mobile using Tapatalk

I dont understand why after the restart the address for WEB GUI wasnt there in the console. The system and pools should be completely separated and even if the pool was unmountable in that moment the system should have been accessible tho in case of some power failure.

 

[Sir.Robin]

Well... i don't know for sure... but i did this on 8.2 something. And you are on 9.2.1.5, wich has the .system dataset on your pool. Maybe thats why..?

 

[D4nthr4x]

I believe that even with hot swap cages you still have to configure it in the bios but I'm not 100% sure on that. I generally just avoid hotswapping because you are putting a lot of faith in the hardware vendors.