replacing a dead drive in a week or so

[VegasTech]

Hello all,
I'm looking for some guidance on replacing a failed drive. The FreeNAS docs walks through the process and I've read a few posts in the forums about other experiences. One thing I have yet to get a clear picture on is can I 'offline' the disk, pull it, and replace it in 2 weeks (I'll be RMA'ing the disk)? Right now the NAS is being used as a backup point for servers, there are (4) drives in RAIDZ2. It can stumble along in a degraded state. I'm under the impression it is safe to run in a degraded state and reboot the NAS a few times and things stay aware of the current status - no drive since it was offline'd and pulled.

* FreeNAS-11.0-U2 (e417d8aa5)
* msg from system: The volume ds01 state is DEGRADED: One or more devices has been removed by the administrator. Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state.
* and a big &^%$!# since all of the drives are less than 3 months old
* the drives are running off the SATA ports on the mobo, no RAID controllers (running in JBOD)

 

[Ericloewe]

It's as safe as running an equivalent RAIDZ1 pool. Less than ideal, but not the end of the world.

 

[Stux]

Recently went through same scenario. Ran one of my 8-way Raidz2 vdevs with an offline drive for a couple of weeks awaiting an RMA.

It was only a 3 weeks old too.

Sucks but.

 

[danb35]

One thing I have yet to get a clear picture on is can I 'offline' the disk, pull it, and replace it in 2 weeks (I'll be RMA'ing the disk)?

As the others have said, yes, you can do this. You might want to see whether you can advance RMA the disk, though--I know WD will do that for a nominal fee (or at least would, the last time I replaced one of theirs).

 

[ethereal]

one of the reasons i use wd is if they are under warranty they will immediately ship you a replacement drive if you ask for it.

i don't think you have to pay - but they do put a hold on your credit card in case you don't send them the faulty drive.