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IMPORTANT Info Regarding Replacing Drives

cinelife

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Hi Folks, I suspect not many out there know this, but when upgrading drives using the "one-at-a-time" method (versus full Replication of all content), you lose the ability to re-use those drives as a set, and if they are out-of-warranty, the individual drives cannot be re-initialized, so basically the drives are useless.

Example: You own a 1U with Four 4TB drives and decide to upgrade the drives to 6TB, with the idea you will re-sell the used 4TB's as a set for someone to use in an empty 1U after all content is transferred.

You have Two options:

1. Purchase Four (or whatever is required for content size) new 6TB drives (that include a file system), and use a separate empty 1U to Replicate all content at the same time. This will keep the drive "set" intact and the drives can be re-used as a set. Warranty is not a factor. Note: If you plan to sell the drives individually, they would still need to be re-initialized by K (assuming in-warranty), but can be used as a set in another 1U without the need to be reinitialized.

2. Avoid the need for a second Server for Replication by intentionally "failing" one drive at a time and waiting for that drive to rebuild before failing the next drive. This works as well, but unfortunately doing it this way modifies the file set because it thinks the "new" file set includes the "current" 4 drives, and the removed drive is no longer part of the set. So basically you end up with 4 old drives that are no longer tied together as a set because of this process. If the drives are still under warranty, they can be re-initialized by K (for a fee), and sold as individual drives. If OOW, they cannot be reinitialized, and will not work in any other server.

Point is, if you plan to re-sell your drives, and they are currently OOW, you must use Option #1. Option #2 works if you are still under warranty and plan to reinitialize the drives thru Support, OR, if you plan to discard the old drives.


Jim
 
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Yes. The "force-fail" method also leaves your system vulnerable during the rebuild. Should another drive die during that process, you can lose all your data.

Replication does take a long time. The force-fail method isn't a speed demon either though. During replication, you would lose access of all content on the original server while data is being transferred over to the new server, which is generally at a rate of about 1TB per day, so a 12TB array will take almost two weeks to replicate over to a new server and you will only have half your content available after 6 days. You cannot choose the order content is copied over, so it is newest content first and older stuff comes online later. (There is a partial work around for this but it is cumbersome).

The force fail method took 2 days per hard drive the last time I did it, so nearly a month to upgrade a 3U server but all content remained available during the process. As it was a full 3U with 4TB drives, replication would have taken 48 days!
 
As long as we're on the topic, can you describe the force-fail method in detail? Do you have to power down the system before pulling the old drive? Once the old drive is out, do you have to power up and wait some period of time for it to do something before you put the new drive in and let it do its RAID recovery process? Thanks!
-josh
 
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