I have 12 drives in my system. I’m troubleshooting slow transfers and one thing I stumbled on is some of the hard drives I bought are not the exact same model as others and I’m thinking about swapping them so that each pool has the exact same hard drives, well at least one of them will all be the same.
After spending several hours and multiple attempts to just swap them, delete them, write them with zeroes ect I could never get them to trade places as it were.
It seems like the system grabs onto the long serial numbers assigned and does not let them out of the pool no matter what and the only thing it will take is a clean wiped hard drive.
The good news is no matter what I did I have been able to completely restore the original configuration.
Unfortunately I can’t wipe sas drives outside of my server.
How? The solnet-array-test script may help here, in a non-destructive manner.
What’s the issue?
Unless the specifications are very different, this is unlikely to cause bottlenecks. Soma actually mix different drives on purpose to avoid simultaneous failures and “bad batch” effect.
Indeed, ZFS is smart. You’d need to to at least wipe the partition table and label area.
I do have everything setup. That however does not answer your question. I’m not sure how to answer it, I have 6 of the drives in one pool and 6 in another. That all seems ok.
I have a separate post about the troubleshooting. For the most part the slow transfers was due to a defective switch port. Now that is resolved my speeds are ok, not as good as before, but I digress.
The issue at hand is can I swap drives between the two pools without using an external computer to wipe them as I can’t wipe the sas drives yet. If that is my only option then I’ll work on it. This has really become an OCD thing so I should just let it go.
