[ale] New hard drive procedure

[Michael Trausch]

+1. 

If you're running a system that "can't" go down under reasonably normal circumstances, have at least two drives and use btrfs on them, set to an appropriate redundancy mode. With weekly or monthly scrubs of the volume, you'll get even earlier warning than SMART monitoring alone, plus your data is recovered on the fly for errors that are spatially related.

I use a four disk setup (4x1TB) with btrfs in double redundancy mode. I've had it catch some instances of silent corruption that wouldn't ever be caught by anything other than probably ZFS, and automatically recover. That's a winner for me. Plus it's insanely flexible, way more so than LVM2. Say goodbye to backup, drive swap, restore and resize. Just swap and resize.

Note well: as with software raid, the processes for planned vs. emergency drive replacement differ. In this case, planned is shrink, swap, grow, rebalance. Emergency is of course swap, rebuild from redundancy. The former is less time-intensive compared to the latter. When you've seen the first scrub reporting recovery occurring on a disk due to media errors and not silent corruption, it's time to replace that drive using the planned procedure before you have to use the emergency one, when possible. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 6, 2015, at 8:10 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I do nothing more than install it and run it. I let my OS do the checking with smartctl.
> 
> I will do a quick check of the specs and compare to the manual or manufactures specs to make sure nothing obvious.
> 
> I've probably installed 3-4 hundred as singles and I don't _want_ to think how many as array units. I've never had a bad new drive out of the box. I've had a few, maybe 2 or 3 that failed within a couple of months and given the power supply died shortly after, I'm pretty sure it was killed the drives.
> 
> Most of the used drives I've installed have failed within a few months. All were over 5 years old when I got them.
> 
>> On Sat, 2015-06-06 at 19:59 -0400, Sam Rakowski wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I've purchased a new hard drive(magnetic) to replace an old one that has
>> some bad sectors on it. I haven't ever bought a new hard drive; most of my
>> hard drives come used or part of a new device.
>> 
>> I'm just interested in hearing what you all run through when you receive a
>> new hard drive. Zero it? Run badblocks? All or none of the above?
>> 
>> Sam
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> -- 
> James P. Kinney III
> 
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> 
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