So I've screwed up in a number of ways,
I threw my FreeNAS setup together, without properly reading the documentation or knowing precisely what I was doing. Now I've got some problems and was wondering if some of you guys could help me get back on track.
I've got 7x 2TB drives set up in RAIDZ-2, and for a while I've been having some SMART issues with one. I've been getting CAM Status Timeout errors and have been unable to perform SMART tests on it, but it still seemed to be working, and I wasn't receiving major alerts, so I just let it go.
Now I'm showing a degraded status because another one of my drives is acting up. I realize I need to replace both of those disks, but the other way I screwed up is that I bought consumer grade drives instead of NAS drives, which according to this article http://www.custompcreview.com/artic...ard-drive-network-attached-storage-nas/19177/ are prone to disaster when you attempt disk replacement.
Long story short, my main question is, in the experience of you more advanced FreeNAS users, how liable am I to lose everything in my pool if I get some new NAS drives and attempt to replace them? If I've got about 3.5 TB of data in the pool right now, would it be a good idea to get a 4TB drive and back everything up to it before I attempt replacement? Following that, in the interests of making sure I never screw up this bad again, I think I need to learn how to set up automatic SMART tests and periodic email notifications. Instructions for that are in the wiki right?
P.S. I can provide exact error messages for the drive that's giving timeout and CAM STATUS errors, but still appears to be functioning if it would help.
I threw my FreeNAS setup together, without properly reading the documentation or knowing precisely what I was doing. Now I've got some problems and was wondering if some of you guys could help me get back on track.
I've got 7x 2TB drives set up in RAIDZ-2, and for a while I've been having some SMART issues with one. I've been getting CAM Status Timeout errors and have been unable to perform SMART tests on it, but it still seemed to be working, and I wasn't receiving major alerts, so I just let it go.
Now I'm showing a degraded status because another one of my drives is acting up. I realize I need to replace both of those disks, but the other way I screwed up is that I bought consumer grade drives instead of NAS drives, which according to this article http://www.custompcreview.com/artic...ard-drive-network-attached-storage-nas/19177/ are prone to disaster when you attempt disk replacement.
Long story short, my main question is, in the experience of you more advanced FreeNAS users, how liable am I to lose everything in my pool if I get some new NAS drives and attempt to replace them? If I've got about 3.5 TB of data in the pool right now, would it be a good idea to get a 4TB drive and back everything up to it before I attempt replacement? Following that, in the interests of making sure I never screw up this bad again, I think I need to learn how to set up automatic SMART tests and periodic email notifications. Instructions for that are in the wiki right?
P.S. I can provide exact error messages for the drive that's giving timeout and CAM STATUS errors, but still appears to be functioning if it would help.