Help with Faulted Drive – Trying to Wipe, Reconnect, and Resilver Before RMA (Newbie)

TrueNAS General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m pretty new to TrueNAS and still learning the ropes, so I hope this isn’t too basic of a question.

One of the drives in my TrueNAS system is showing some errors, and the pool has gone into a DEGRADED state. Here’s the alert I received:

Alerts:

  • Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], ATA error count increased from 37 to 39.
  • Self-Test Log error count increased from 5 to 6.
  • 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sector.
  • 1 Offline uncorrectable sector.
  • Pool is DEGRADED: One or more devices are faulted in response to persistent errors.
  • Disk is FAULTED.

This drive is still under warranty, and I plan to contact the seller for a replacement. But before I go through the return process, I’d like to try wiping the drive, connecting it to a different SATA port, and see if I can reuse it by resilvering it back into the pool—just to make sure it’s truly failing.

Since I’m new to this, I could really use some guidance on the following:

  1. What’s the best way to wipe/clear the drive in TrueNAS before trying to reconnect it?
  2. Is this even worth attempting or should I just RMA it straight away?

Any help or step-by-step advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

2

These should give you a start:

I suggest going through the additional search results on the wipe as sometimes the wipe might not succeed in some cases.

If you are worried about sending a non-wiped disk to RMA, yes your concern is valid - but when the disk does not execute commands there are only a few things that can be done to destroy the data. So next time may be consider encrypting the new disk in the beginning itself if you are worried about the data sensitivity.

3

I would not worry too much about wiping the drive and for these reasons (all personal experience stuff):

  1. If the drive is part of a RAIDZ, then all the data on the drive is not complete and scattered all over the place (not contiguous). If it was part of a two drive mirror, that would be a different story.
  2. If wiping a drive, I would not do it on your TrueNAS system, it is way too easy to select the wrong drive and then you will have issues. Wipe on a seperate machine, an external drive adapter works well.

The second item is really not something you want to learn the hard way.

1 Like
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For an informed opinion you should have provided a complete smartctl -x output (as formatted text </> please).
But my poorly informed assessment is that you should not bother and send the drive for RMA. Use this warranty!

5

Exactly… learning from experience is always good. But sometimes, it’s even better to learn from others experience!