When replacing drives, can I shut the server down inbetween?

TrueNAS General
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1

Hi there,
I am going to upgrade the drives in my server - i’m going to replace them one by one with larger drives.

In all of the documentation I have seen about drive replacement, I don’t see anywhere about when you don’t have hot swap bays. With my server chasis, I will have to shut down the server to work on it for each drive swap - can the same steps about taking a drive offline etc be done but shutting down the server inbetween selecting a replacement drive?

Let me know your thoughts

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Yes of course.
Even with hot-swap bays, it is advisable to power off before swapping disks around, for safety.

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Thanks for your reply. It just strange there seems to be no mention of shutting down in documentation anywhere. It all just talks about swapping with the server running the whole time.

So the steps would be to Offline a drive > Shut down the server, swap the drive out > Turn on server > Replace disk in pool?

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Just to reply to my own thread - there actually is talk of how to replace disks in non-swappable servers. I completely missed that.

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Yes, but note that the procedure is decribed for replacing a drive that has totally failed.
If the drive to be replaced is not totally failed and you have a spare bay/spare port, it is advisable to leave it in place:

  • (power off)
  • install new drive
  • (power on)
  • replace drive in GUI—do not offline!
  • old drive is automatically offlined when done
  • (power off)
  • take out old drive

Rince and repeat.

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That does make sense - I don’t have a spare bay unfortunately so i will be having to reseilver

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AFAIK, hot-swap bays also need hot-swap capable storage controllers and hot-swap capable drives in order to be able actually to hot-swap successfully.

So do as @etorix suggests and power off.

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ahh interesting okay, thanks for the info. Currently reseilvering drive #2/4