I can’t figure out which drive is my hot spare. I’m on TN Scale ElectricEel-24.10.2.2. When I do ‘zpool status’ from the shell it doesn’t list a spare and I can’t find anything in the GUI to show it either. Any help would be great.
root@Scale01[~]# zpool status
pool: Pool1
state: ONLINE
status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool.
The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Enable all features using ‘zpool upgrade’. Once this is done,
the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 13:04:04 with 0 errors on Sun Jun 15 13:04:05 2025
config:
pool: boot-pool
state: ONLINE
status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool.
The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Enable all features using ‘zpool upgrade’. Once this is done,
the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:00:43 with 0 errors on Sun Jul 6 03:45:44 2025
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
boot-pool ONLINE 0 0 0
nvme0n1p3 ONLINE 0 0 0
Based on your output it suggests you don’t have a hot-spare. Do you remember creating one? Did it kick in once upon a time and you promoted it perhaps?
It’s been a while since I set this box up but I set it as a Raidz1 and selected the 5 disks. They are 8TB drives so 7.2 of usable space and I am showing 28TB of total space so seems like one of them should be a spare. I have not done any kind of promoting.
Ah ok so I think you are confusing hot-spares with RAID-Z.
You have a 5 disk Z1 which essentially means you can lose one of your drives and not lose your pool. If you lose 2 or more then you have lost your pool. RAID-Z2 is the same but you can afford to lose 2 drives and Z3 etc.
Hot-spares essentially lie in wait for a disk to fail before they jump in to the save the day.
It looks like your 5 disk Z1 is fine atm and you don’t currently have a hot-spare.
You are confusing spare and parity/redundancy drives. A spare would be an unused drive that replaces a failed one without manual operator intervention.
ZFS does not use dedicated parity drives so the parity information is distributed across all five drives. They are all treated equally.
RAIDZ1 as @Johnny_Fartpants already pointed out means you can lose one drive and your data will still be ok.
Well, that went by me too! But we do choose to commemorate notable people - our most recent two adoptions occurred in a mid-June period, just after the anniversary of the first scaling of Everest.
So, the male’s name is Edmund (after Sir Edmund Hilary) and the female is Junko (after Junko Tabei, the first woman to scale Everest) - and Junko just happens to be a tabby.
