On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 4:05 PM, Adam Goryachev <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I wanted to mention this, what drives do you have right now, and do know > about SCT ERC? > Maybe start here (but you probably need to read more): > http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg48199.html A major reason as to why the drives are getting replaced. Back in early 2012 when I setup the machine there was no obvious information that the ERC type drives were needed so I just bought vanilla drives. > > Essentially, your current disks might be fine, but if you don't have the > right settings, they could be "failing" regularly putting your data at risk. > You should fix any issue here before you attempt to replace your drives. I now have 2 long term drives which are likely still good and 2 cheap drives that are quite new but which I don't trust for long term reliability, therefore the push to change them all. > >> the fail remove and add process 4 seperate times might not be a good thing >> but I do not know of a different option. Compounding the difficulty is >> that there >> are no empty hard drive slots in the machine. I do have an external USB >> 3.0 >> 2 drive holder that could be used. >> >> The only suggestion in all the documents I perused was to place spare >> drives >> into something like this external box and then add the drives into the >> array. >> The process was not laid out and leaves me with a number of questions. >> >> Is there a suggested method for replacing ALL the drives in an array (raid >> 10 >> in this case)? > > > In order to replace all drives, I would suggest that you simply replace one > drive 4 times (different drive each time). > The first question to ask, is your external USB drive bay reliable? If not, > then there are other solutions that are probably less dangerous. > > So, add your spare drive to the external USB drive bay, it should show up as > /dev/sdy (for example) > Partition to match the rest of your existing drives > Add the new partition to your existing array: mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add > /dev/sdx1 > Replace one of the existing drives with the new one: mdadm /dev/md0 > --replace /dev/sda1 --with /dev/sdx1 > Personally, because I distrust the external USB drive bay (don't ask me why, > it just seems less reliable than internal sata), once the drive has finished > being replaced, I would shutdown, remove the old drive, and install the > replacement drive, then add another new spare, and repeat. > > You can see this page for some extra information: > http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/74924/how-to-safely-replace-a-not-yet-failed-disk-in-a-linux-raid5-array >> >> If I use the external box how do I do this (external box only holds 2 >> drives) so >> that I can transfer the information on the drives from the array to >> the new drives >> and then just replace the drives 2 at a time into the machine without >> there being >> issues because in the information transfer the drives will be sdg and >> sdh (AFAIK) >> and later they will be some of sdb, sdc, sde, and/or sdf. > > I would suggest replacing one at a time. There is no way to do them one after another copying over all four and then only needing to shut the box down once or failing that doing the process 2 times necessitating only 2 shutdowns instead of 4 is there? The external USB box does have room for 2 drives at once. TIA Dee -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
