Just learned something new. It appears that hot-spares don’t work if you have a checkpoint on your pool. All my systems have a handful of hot-spares and I just had a drive fail overnight and to my surprise none of the spares had kicked in.
Reason was this:
zfsd 98 - - Replace vdev(tank/13090740039920181174): cannot replace 13090740039920181174 with /dev/gptid/e4479901-95ac-11ed-8eee-3cecef0f5468: checkpoint exists
Just sharing this info so people are aware if they choose to start utilising checkpoints.
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Update: disk replacements also don’t work if you have a checkpoint in place. You must first discard the checkpoint before replacement works.
Appreciate this may well be old news to some people but for me today is a learning day.
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I added this very crucial caveat to my post. Thank you for sharing it! The reason I didn’t add it sooner was because I thought I already had after reading your posts.
Better late than never!
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Great. Is it worth highlighting that this is also an issue for routine disk replacements outside of the hot-swap scope?
You do catch it with this statement “You cannot remove or modify vdevs if a checkpoint exists” however I’m not sure how many people reading the post would fully appreciate that this would mean disk replacements would fail.
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Good point. I reworded that part.
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