Add Spare Drives to Zpool

HowTo : Add Spare Drives to Zpool

Spare drives in a ZFS or any RAID configuration is a must have. Consider this – A winter storm hits and a snowplow piles 3 feet of snow in your driveway. 5 minutes later a drive in your system fails. You’re stuck until you can plow or snowblow your way out of your drive. Without spare drives in your system, you run the risk of additional drives failing while that drive is offline. Depending on the ZFS or RAID level a second drive failure could cause permanent data loss. If you have a spare drive (or multiple spare drives) in your system, you can automatically start rebuilding the array as soon as it detects that a drive has failed. This limits the amount of time that your ZFS or RAID subsystem is unprotected.

To add spare drives to your system first run the format command to find the disks that you have in your system.

Format Command

Once you have run the format command, you should have a list of disks that you can select for your spare drives. Select the ones that you would like to use (Our spare drives are c4t23d0 and c4t24d0) and issue this command :

zpool add tank spare c4t2d0
zpool add tank spare c4t3d0

Once you issue that command, it should add the spare drives to the zpool. Run the “zpool status” command to make sure it was updated as expected.

ZFS Add Spare Drives ZFS Spare Drives Added