Auto Mount Hot Spare

[CLSegraves]

Hello,

Some time ago I looked into having a hot spare that would automatically mount, but I was told that FreeNAS did not (at least at the time) support auto mounting hot spares.

Does FreeNAS support auto mounting a hot spare?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[gpsguy]

According to the release notes in the documentation, it was added after the initial release of 9.3. Given that it didn't work for so long, I can't remember if there's been any forum discussions about it finally working.

"Support for hot spare drive replacement has been added. If you have spare drives in your pool, and a drive fails, FreeNAS® should automatically remove the failed drive from the pool and replace it with the spare."

 

[Mlovelace]

I had a drive fail on Wednesday night last week and had to swap to the spare in the GUI. I can attest that the latest version's "hot spare" isn't functioning as advertised. That said, its worth having a spare on board so you can swap to it without having to be on-site.

 

[CLSegraves]

That's unfortunate (that hot spare isn't functional).

For me, my NAS is at home so I'm "on-site" every evening, so physically swapping isn't really an issue. It would just be nice to be able to have the system monitor and take care of itself automatically.

 

[jgreco]

It has worked. I don't know if it's working right now. But we did have a disk drop out sometime after 9.3 first came out and it just magically went and replaced the drive.

 

[Ericloewe]

As jgreco said, results have been mixed. Please do enable it, but please don't rely on it yet. When you have any pertinent feedback, please share it with us.