Re: Questions

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On 16/02/2016 22:46, o1bigtenor wrote:
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.

Note, most drives either still support it, or else can be worked around to avoid the timeout mismatch. You should do this before continue to replace the drives, as you want to avoid this happening in the middle of replacing drives.
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.

Put two blank drives into the USB, replace first one, replace second one (would suggest second drive as non-matching pair). Shutdown, move two new drives internal, place two new drives into drive bay, and repeat for the last two drives.

I would suggest adding a bitmap for at least the time you are doing the replacements, then if you have a failure on the USB enclosure during the 2nd or 4th drive, at least the 1st or 3rd will re-sync quickly.

Regards,
Adam
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