In order to replace perfectly working 2TB drives on a RAID with 8TB drives (four total drives), I am trying to do one at a time. In Pools → Status, I take one drive, ada1, to ‘offline’ status, and I know which drive that is by the serial number. While the system is still running, I physically unplug SATA and power plugs to that drive. I plug in the new 8TB drive to the same power and SATA connectors.
Now I go back into the Pools, Status, and I see the new drive listed with its serial number under ‘/dev/gptid/[serialnumber of drive]’. The status for it now says, UNAVAIL. If I try to change to status to ‘Replace’, it pops up a dialog that asks for Member Disk. There is nothing in the dropdown, the Replace Disk button is greyed out, cannot click. Can’t do anything.
If I try to change the status to ‘Online’, there is no change, the status remains, UNAVAIL.
I am at a loss as to how to replace one drive with a larger drive on my four drive RAID setup with TrueNAS. I want to replace all 2TB drives with 8TB drives. I am trying to do one at a time, but the first one doesn’t want to be replaced.
What am I doing wrong?? I am following the exact steps from the TrueNAS documentation!
My original four WD Black 2TB drives have been running flawlessly for almost 10 years. I have never replaced any of them. I just need more total space. My RAID is such that I am currently using four 2TB drives to get 6TB total space. So I can afford to lose one drive while maintaining integrity.
Please post the version of TrueNAS and the version of the online docs you are using.
Also post your hardware details and if you are Raid-Z1, Raid-Z2 or Mirrors.
We don’t know if you have an spare HD ports to do drive replacement in place or are stuck with physically powering off, swapping a drive, etc.
The new drive is a brand new WD RED Pro 8TB, straight from the packaging. TrueNAS is not seeing it all when I connect it where one of the 2TB drives was plugged in (power and SATA). The other drive I mentioned in original post is just the SSD that it boots to in order to run FReeNAS, and not one of the RAID drives. TrueNAS is not seeing the new 8TB at all.
What do you mean by “wipe?” It’s brand new out of the box. Shouldn’t it see the drive? I got four brand new 8TB drives ready to go, but it won’t see it.
Where does it tell me which RAID I am using? I have four 2TB drives to get 6TB total, where one drive can go bad. I think I remember seeing RAID Z1 somewhere, but I can’t find it.
I have a mini motherboard with 6 SATA ports. I am using one SATA port for the boot SSD, and four of the other SATA ports for the NAS drives. So there is one SATA port not being used.
Here is the documentation for “replacing drives.” It only talks about replacing failed drives, nothing about replacing working drives.
What is a “hot spare?”
Am I supposed to turn the computer off when adding a new hard drive? I tried this the first time, after selecting the status to ‘offline,’ and the computer would not even boot up. I couldn’t even enter the BIOS to tell it to boot off the SSD, so I tried replacing the hard drive while the computer was on, per instructions.
I don’t know the specific motherboard model, but it’s just a little one, made to use for a NAS, and has an Intel i3-4130–T @2.9 GHz
It has 6 SATA ports, and I am using 5 of them. Why can’t I boot from it when I plug in one of the new 8TB drives on one of the SATA ports where one of the 2TB drives used to be? It has an SSD drive for the TrueNAS boot drive. I can’t even enter the BIOS using F2 or DEL when I hard reset and boot with one of the new 8TB drives plugged in! I’ve been building windows PCs for 30+ years and have never seen this…
Ok, I tried another new WD Red Pro 8TB. I powered off, installed the drive, rebooted, and now TrueNAS sees it. The trick is to go into Storage…Disks, and then click the little drop down at the right on the row that appears for the new drive I just added. In the new section that open underneath, there will be a button showing ‘WIPE.’ That button was not there before.
I clicked it for the new 8TB, and it did stuff. Is it now “wiped,” whatever that means.
Now, go back Storage…Pools, and click the settings gear icon. Now find the row for the new drive, and click the vertical … at the right. Now you can click ‘Replace’, and it will now show the new ‘ada1’, or which ever drive you replaced. Click that ada and it will then replace it.
Too bad the documentation and everything online has NOTHING about the step where you MUST WIPE FIRST before it will replace. This could’ve taken 30 seconds, instead of four hours.
You have to install the new drives WITH THE POWER OFF also.
I would also be nice to see on the Pool Status window BOTH the Name of the drive (i.e., ada0, ada1, ada2, etc.) AND the Serial Number of the drive at the same time so you don’t have to write it down or go back and forth between windows! Let’s make this as hard as possible so newbies will learn to hate it.
