 It is hard drive replacement day, which has also been for a little while because this is labeled. We'll talk about that label in a second here. And these have the fancy label that says spare drive. These are the spares that we are going to swap out and I'll walk through this process. And that process started when a notification was sent to me from my TrueNAS. Now I did correlate this with logs that I have because I sent all my TrueNAS server logs to Greylog and it did have a bunch of VDev write errors. The notification, it stopped writing to the drive because it said, hey, there's too many errors on this drive. So I'd actually take the drive. I want to try it in a different slot. So I actually erased the drive and put it in a different slot, tried to re-silver it and that resulted in more errors. So that pretty much concluded and I feel as though I did my due diligence making sure that drive was good. So now I want to walk you through the process for how you replace these drives. And one side note, if you're wondering how hard it is or challenging it may be to find a drive, the way the 45 drive server works with all the drives basically going straight down into the system, all these serial numbers are right on top, making them pretty easy to read. That being said, they're still kind of small. So I put a little piece of blue tape. Maybe I can quickly identify the drive that was giving me problems. So when I moved it from one slot to another, I didn't have to try to remember in case I accidentally grabbed the wrong drive or if I had one of my staff do it, I'm like, hey, go get that drive with the blue tape and pull it out if I need to have them do that. Now we're gonna be doing this in TrueNAS Core 13.0 U31, which is the most current version here in January of 2023. But this is the TrueNAS Scale 22.12 system. And I wanna first show you where the menus are inside of TrueNAS Scale for the same thing, essentially. We're gonna go to storage. And if we wanna see the manage disk menu, that's under storage and manage disk. And this is gonna be the same view you're gonna see when we go back over to TrueNAS Core. Of note, storage. And if you would like to see the topology of devices, which is gonna be under status for TrueNAS Core, but here we just click on the drives and the same menus to take it offline right here or edit and replace the disk here and the same dialogues come up. We're not redoing it on a TrueNAS Scale system, but I didn't feel like making two videos. So I'll show you that the process is pretty much the same for either one of these. Now, before we go over to TrueNAS Core and show you how to do this, let's talk about the smart error and how to find that. Now, I like doing this from the command line because I find it easier to read. We're just running smart control dash A dev DA12. Dev DA12 is the one that I received in the email. So I know this is the drive that's given me the problem. Go ahead and press enter. It scrolls by real fast with all the data, but we wanna focus on this right here, relocated sector count. It's funny because every time I look at this, this sector count gets just a little bit higher because the drive is continuing to fail. Now, right now the drive is kind of correcting itself because there's not much going on in terms of rights to the drive. So the pool at the moment shows clean. So if we go back over to our TrueNAS Core system, we're gonna storage, then pools. The system is showing with a green check mark here. If we go here to status, we can see that all the drives are showing online. Now, let's take a moment over here at this. Now, one thing I do is customize, and this is the same on both systems as well. And add the description right here. This makes it easy to find drives I've put labels in, such as problem drive. You can do that just by clicking the edit button and putting in and filling a description here. That being said, all these belong to pool trinity. And we can sort by clicking on pool. We can see that these two drives show up at the top are two extra drives that I have in a system, DA27 and DA28. By the way, the serial numbers are right here. Once again, makes it easy to sort and find which drives are which. But we're gonna go ahead and replace the problem drive out by going back over to pool, going here to the status and finding DA12, which is right here. Let's go ahead and replace it. Member disk, DA28. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and check force, but hopefully I don't need to. I don't think there's anything on these drives. Force is just a way to forcibly erase over that drive in case there was something else on there. I don't think I have anything else on that particular drive. So we'll go ahead and replace disk. And now it's gonna go through the replacing process. Now we have successfully replaced disk DA12. So we'll hit close and we'll go back up here to the top of the status. And it did this automatically, kicks off the re-silvering. Time remaining about 13 minutes, seven minutes, four minutes. Well, it's gonna go relatively fast. Now, one more thing I will note is that you actually can wipe drives that aren't attached to anything right from inside of TrueNAS. So if you see these drives, you notice that ones that are not part of any pool have the wipe option on them versus the ones right here do not because it won't let you wipe a drive that's part of an existing pool. So it's just something to note if you needed to wipe a drive that you would just put in because you had something else on there, I'd recommend you do that that way you don't run into any potential hiccups. And that's all there is for the process for replacing a drive in TrueNAS. It's relatively simple. Now, you could if you don't have time to get out to a place or you want it to do it automatically, there are ways to set up strategies where you can label something specifically as a hot spare. What that will do is if a drive becomes unreadable and fails, it can grab the spare and automatically put it in play. Now, doing it that way has a couple other caveats. If you have a hot spare, it doesn't leave it in place. It's kind of like a temporary until you get another drive or you can promote that drive essentially from hot spare to normal member of the VDev. It's kind of interesting that it puts the hot spare and it re-silvers it and it becomes completely usable. You don't have to do anything further but it's technically labeled as a, as if it's a temporary replacement, I would say. So you have to actually say, no, this is no longer a hot spare because normally you replace it and it goes back into the hot spare. Also, the hot spare is on a per pool basis, not a multiple pool basis. So even though I had multiple VDevs, the hot spare would have fell into whichever VDev needed it but if it was multiple pools, the spares are assigned to the pool. So that's something to consider when you're setting these up. If that's even a need for myself, I leave those couple extra drives I had because of the layout we had didn't accommodate them. We only had 29, not 30 drives. So I just had two of them as spares because one of them had already went bad as soon as I had set the system up if you're wondering what happened to one of them. Cause when I originally did a review yesterday was 30 drives. We had tried a lot of different configurations and then things happened cause that's how life goes occasionally. And that's why we have these RAID systems with ZFS for resiliency. But having it being RAID Z2 means up to two drives could fail before I'm in trouble. So one drive failing, not a big deal. That's why I waited a couple of weeks to do it, mostly so I could do a video on it. I could have just went in there and replaced it right away but I'm like, I'm gonna do a video on this and just had to find time. Leave your thoughts and comments down below or head on my forum for a more in-depth discussion. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you'd like to hire a short project, head over to laurancesystems.com and click the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. For deals, discounts and offers, check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly. So check back frequently. 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