News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Don’t Be Afraid of RAID by louwrentius on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:55PM (#23292802)
I should write a follow up article: you should test drive replacement / simulate failure before you start using storage.

This makes you comfortable using it and do things like drive replacements.

Products from Synology/QNAP or other brands have nice interfaces that will make things really easy for you.

Replacing the failed drive in my array was one simple command:

mdadm --add /dev/md6 /dev/sde

Then the rebuild started.

Re:Don’t Be Afraid of RAID by cyphar on Sunday May 24, 2020 @07:54PM (#23296079)
And similarly, in ZFS it'd be

  % zpool replace <pool> <bad-drive> <new-drive>
And you can also set up hot spares in both systems so that replacing the drive happens automatically.

One thing I would suggest is that you use /dev/disk/by-id when configuring mdadm or ZFS. Device renumbering over reboots under Linux isn't an issue for either system (they look at the metadata on disk rather than the drive name in /dev), but as an admin it helps to be able to type out the actual serial number on the drive when you're doing reboots (especially if you have the serial numbers written on the hotswap bays).