Re: Failing disk advice

["Joshua M. Boniface" <joshua@boniface.me>]

If you know it's going to fail and already plan to replace it, remove it manually. Though MDADM usually handles disk failures gracefully, if the HDD gets into an "I say I work but don't" situation (and they do) it can get ugly fast; I've seen this crash more than one system and once caused data loss (because the second disk also started failing silently, but MDADM hadn't detected the first failure yet and hence hadn't started rebuilding until it was too late). Better safe then sorry!

On March 5, 2017 1:10:55 PM EST, Gregory Seidman <gsslist+debian@anthropohedron.net> wrote:

I have a disk that is reporting SMART errors. It is an active disk in a
(kernel, not hardware) RAID1 configuration. I also have a hot spare in the
RAID1, and md hasn't decided it should fail the disk and switch to the hot
spare. Should I proactively tell md to fail the disk (and let the hot spare
take over), or should I just wait until md notices a problem?

--Greg

-- 
Joshua Boniface
Linux System Administrator
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.