Drive replacement process confuses one drive for another (very scary)

TrueNAS General
1

My NAS has just had it’s 7th birthday. My original drives have performed very well but I received my first SMART errors from one of the drives so I figured I should replace these drives before fate forces me to.

I have five WD 4TB Red drives (RAIDZ1). Two Kingston SSD’s as a mirrored boot volume.

I marked the first drive as offline and powered off the system. I physically removed the Offline drive and replaced it with a fresh new one. When I booted TrueNAS, I received an error that my pool is degraded because one of the Kingston drives was missing. I freaked out. I checked the status of the boot pool and all was fine. Still, TrueNAS thought I had pulled one of the SSDs. Going into the Storage under Manage Devices the drive I had pulled was still listed but when I selected it, I’d get no details, no Replace button no nothing. I powered down the system, added back the old drive and powered it up. Everything went back to normal with the exception of a checksum error on the Offline drive (to be expected). I repeated the process again, powered off, remove the old drive, insert the new drive, power on and this time I was able to replace the disk.

I had to go through this same convelluted process for every single drive.

I didn’t have any “spare” SATA ports to install the new drives alongside the old ones. What was I doing wrong?

Thanks!

2

7 Years, very nice. And smart to replace the drives on your time vice once they start failing when they want to.

I would request that you specify the version of TrueNAS you were using.

It sounds like you did things correctly, however you do have a spare SATA port, one of the boot drives could have been removed and that would open up the SATA port for use. Once the drives are replaced, then you can restore the boot-pool mirror.

Honestly, I don’t care for a mirrored boot pool and I say this often. Just maintain a copy of your TrueNAS Configuration files and restoration is very simple. But that is my “personal” preference and my servers have very little configuration type changes (user accounts likely being the most prominent item for a business).

Anyway, you can look at that SATA port in the future next time as an option.