Greetings…
Let me start off by saying I’m not familiar with FreeNas or TrueNas at all, but I recently encountered an environment with one in it. Unfortunately, it has two failed drives out of the eight. The first question I have… With 2 failed drives, is the actual data all lost or is it recoverable? The second question is… HGST drives are no longer available to find a replacement. Will any 8TB SATA drives work for these systems?
Thanks for any help ya’ll can give.
Hi there! First, and by far most important: until you know the answer to this question, do not remove any drives!
This is because the answer depends on specific details of how the system was configured. And if you misinterpret how the system was configured, you can do a lot of damage very quickly.
If you’re able, please show us a screenshot of your storage pool’s status UI. Or (if you prefer) the output of sudo zpool status from a shell prompt. Either one will do.
I would guess that a single eight-drive NAS would probably be arranged in what’s known as a RAIDZ2 configuration. If so then the good news is that you’re right at the edge of a cliff but have not yet fallen off.
(There are also other topologies in which you can also have hope, or which could go either way. The status display will be very clarifying.)
Yes, any 8TB or higher SATA drive will work.*
It’s helpful to match speeds where possible.
There is one caveat: *if you insert (for example) a 7.998 TB drive in place of an 8.026 TB drive, then this particular 8TB drive might not suffice. Nothing bad will happen; the system will explain what’s wrong.
But again: please don’t change anything before someone reviews your ZFS pool status. Whether or not you still have a chance of recovery, you appear to have no room for error. Even assuming your pool is intact right now: the additional strain involved in replacing one failed drive might be too much for a third or fourth drive of this batch.
It will be important that you’re certain which physical disk matches which logical disk from the status display. Hopefully your enclosure is able to help you with that. Fingers crossed!
