Skip to main content

Alpha This is a new website theme. Help me improve it and give your feedback (opens in a new tab).

Replacing a hard drive

Published:

Tags:

Sysadmin Zfs
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

I’ve got a hard drive in a zpool that is starting to show some SMART errors. I’d really like to replace it, but unfortunately it’s in a zpool that is configured to stripe and not mirror. I do not have enough SATA ports or disks to convert it to stripe+mirror.

Currently, it’s not possible to remove a drive from a striped zpool. You have to destroy the pool and start again. This is really annoying.

There’s a good write up here about the reasoning, and it has some good links in it too. If you’re interested, I’d recommend reading there. There’s also some good information in this blog post about some things you may not expect from ZFS that would have saved me from some surprises I’ve met since first starting to use ZFS.

Contact