Will Windows break my Zpool? (answered!)

[vitaes]

hi, long-time lurker first-time poster.

for reasons besides the meat of my actual question (though i am happy to go into them if necessary), i had to contact WD support about one of the 6 reds in my NAS.

i tried google-site-search-ing this with about 10-15 different phrasings, but didn't find anything that told me what i'm looking for. if this has actually already been answered, i'm happy to just get linked to another forum post.

WD support wants me to plug the drive into a windows machine and run some piece of WD software to scan the drive, instead of relying on its SMART attributes. i'm happy to do this, though i want to double-check some things and get some assurances first. (i guess i made my title a little clickbaity.)

first off: if i shut down the nas, put the drive into windows, run the test, and then put the drive back into the nas, then turn the nas on;

1. do i need to "offline" the drive first, if it's going to be present both before and after the time-displaced reboot?
2. how about if it might not be, in case the drive returns any errors after all?
3. will windows' automatic disk repairs do anything weird to the data?
4. if it does, will freenas just treat it as corruption and repair the disk if i run a scrub?
5. would freenas instead treat it as proper even if it isn't, and corrupt the zpool?
6. is there anything else that i'm missing that i might need to do?

thanks for all your help, everyone. i read the forum etiquette page over, but please let me know if i'm doing something i shouldn't be anyway.

 

[hugovsky]

Hi vitaes and welcome. Please post your hardware and pool details.

 

[vitaes]

Hi vitaes and welcome. Please post your hardware and pool details.

um, it's a 6-disk raidz2 setup, all 3tb disks. i have 16gb of ecc ram in that asrock rack itx board everyone loves.

 

[hugovsky]

You should have an updated backup just in case. If the test is read-only, you should have no problems. If the test is destructive, you will have to resilver the pool.

 

[vitaes]

just to make sure, you're saying i don't need to do any special precautions to the box itself, even if the test is destructive? and if it is, i'll just need to tell it to resilver in the gui?

 

[hugovsky]

If, for some reason, the disk is erased or replaced, you should only have to replace the disk in the GUI and resilver. Don't forget, you SHOULD have a backup, just in case.

 

[vitaes]

ok, thank you very much!

 

[depasseg]

And FYI - When WD asked me to do that, I told them I didn't have any windows machines that I could attach the drive into (and the USB enclosure connected to a windows laptop didn't work properly). They accepted my Smart results.

 

[vitaes]

And FYI - When WD asked me to do that, I told them I didn't have any windows machines that I could attach the drive into (and the USB enclosure connected to a windows laptop didn't work properly). They accepted my Smart results.

ah, don't i wish i'd just said that – all their software did was run a short smart test, the same as the nas does every 30 minutes anyway. so i did that dis/re-assembly for nothing, really. but, whatever, it's done. makes me wonder if they'd even read my emails, as i detailed precisely the results of the long smart test i'd run a few days prior.

 

[Mirfster]

ah, don't i wish i'd just said that – all their software did was run a short smart test, the same as the nas does every 30 minutes anyway. so i did that dis/re-assembly for nothing, really. but, whatever, it's done. makes me wonder if they'd even read my emails, as i detailed precisely the results of the long smart test i'd run a few days prior.

Doubtful... Most Tier I people stick to a specific script and have a hard time understanding/comprehending much else that deviates. I usually just rapid fire information at them that is above their heads so I get routed to Tier II if not Tier III support... ;)

 

[depasseg]

I had to say it a couple times, and keep reading the SMART test results, but eventually they took the answer and cut me an RMA.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

short smart test, the same as the nas does every 30 minutes anyway

Almost certainly not. Don't confuse the SMART checks, which run every 30 minutes by default, with SMART tests, which run on whatever schedule you set up, and for which a short test every 30 minutes would be absurdly frequent.