On 02/13/2015 04:53 AM, James Allsopp wrote:
I've got home mounted on a LVM partition over two RAID 1 arrays. Unfortunately one of the disks in the second array has dropped out. I can still fdisk -l it, but when I ran dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=/dev/null it got about 132M through a 2Tb drive before crashing out. This doesn't bode well. I can't really afford a new drive, but was wondering if I should just reformat, try and check it for errors and then try and add it back to the array? I was hoping that doing that might allow it to exclude any bad blocks and get me something working for a while whilst I save up.
I've fallen into the "I can't afford another big disk right now trap", and regretted it.
The first step is to backup everything. Then buy a new disk, pull the failing disk, install the new one, and resilver. Alternatively, buy two large NAS drives, set them up as a ZFS mirror, and migrate all your data. (Note that ECC is recommended for ZFS.) Then backup everything again. Then do whatever you like with the failing disk. (I'd wipe and recycle it; I'm not going to trust my data or waste more time on a known failing drive.)
Another note -- most disk manufacturers offer one or more utilities for their products. For example:
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
Good luck,
David