I had some weirdness with my new 3U that I am not sure about. Somehow everything I thought I knew might be wrong!
The server came with 11 x 1tb drives. One drive was flashing indicating that is was a hot spare. The server page indicates the capacity was 8948 GB. I have read here somewhere that the hot spare is not strictly needed (except if you take it out, the server will complain) and consequenly not written to until it gets called into action. And also I thought I read that since it was not written to yet, it was still a 'spare' and could be used in another server the same way any other spare drive could.
I decided to test this theory by turning off the server and removing the drive that had been flashing. I turned it back on and expected to be scolded by the admin page about the missing hot spare. But something weird happened... One of the 10 remaining drives started flashing and the capacity reported went down to 7954 GB. I didn't think it was possible for the filesystem to go down in size... There were no errors anywhere that I could see, everything seemed normal. Any ideas on what is going on?
In the end, I shut the server off again and put the removed drive back in. When I rebooted, the drive that had been removed went back to flashing and the reported capacity went back up to 8948 GB. Is this set still good to use or did I wreck it somehow? Since I am ultimately putting the drives from my 1U into this server, this was more of a science experiment than anything.
The server came with 11 x 1tb drives. One drive was flashing indicating that is was a hot spare. The server page indicates the capacity was 8948 GB. I have read here somewhere that the hot spare is not strictly needed (except if you take it out, the server will complain) and consequenly not written to until it gets called into action. And also I thought I read that since it was not written to yet, it was still a 'spare' and could be used in another server the same way any other spare drive could.
I decided to test this theory by turning off the server and removing the drive that had been flashing. I turned it back on and expected to be scolded by the admin page about the missing hot spare. But something weird happened... One of the 10 remaining drives started flashing and the capacity reported went down to 7954 GB. I didn't think it was possible for the filesystem to go down in size... There were no errors anywhere that I could see, everything seemed normal. Any ideas on what is going on?
In the end, I shut the server off again and put the removed drive back in. When I rebooted, the drive that had been removed went back to flashing and the reported capacity went back up to 8948 GB. Is this set still good to use or did I wreck it somehow? Since I am ultimately putting the drives from my 1U into this server, this was more of a science experiment than anything.