Arch Linux

kornhole

Member

Registered: 2004-11-25

Posts: 8

RAID 5 Drive swap.

I have a RAID 5 setup with 4 1TB drives, one of them sounds like it's on it's last legs, heads zeroing repeatedly, so I went out and bought a replacement drive today, thought I had the dying drive pinpointed using smartctl, only one drive showed any SMART errros, so I figured that must be it. I manually failed that drive:

mdadm /dev/md0 -f /dev/sdf1

shutdown, swapped drives, turned the machine back on again, but I'm still hearing a head zero repeatedly. So I can only assume I've pulled out the wrong drive. Haven't started rebuilding the RAID yet or anything, is it possible to swap that drive back in without having to rebuild? I'm slightly worried that if I attempt to rebuild the array right now, with one dying drive in there it might not make it.

kornhole

Member

Registered: 2004-11-25

Posts: 8

Re: RAID 5 Drive swap.

Well, I didn't overly answer my original question, but averted a crisis. Just went ahead and rebuild the RAID, didn't take as long as expected, seems like things will be just dandy.