HDD replacement in ZRAID-1

[gazdika]

Hello

Having a ZRAID-1 structure with 3 1TB hdd. One of them looks like having troubles, so thinking to change it. My question is that should be the same modell and same capacity or only the capacity in order to be at least equal or maybe bigger than the actual ?

Thanks in advance for help !

[Onichan]

As long as it is the same or greater size then it should be fine. Now I would say you shouldn't put a slower drive in as it will likely hurt performance, but I doubt you have a high end drive. Also replacing it with a bigger drive will not increase your pool size, but it wont hurt it.

[gazdika]

Thanks ! You say that the modell doesn't matter, only the storage capacity should be equal or bigger.
Interesting case, SMART say at pc starting that it's ok, HDAT from Hiren's boot cd the same, but at AHCI at starting I get connection timed out on the hdd's channel, and 4 segmentation fault message one after other at the end of OS initialisation stuff, right before the main menu with the nembered options appears.

[raulfg3]

In the past I have problems that I think are from disk but finally are from cages, please if you use a rapid cage like this, conect disk directly to board using good SATA cables.

if not , sorry I dont know your spec.

[gazdika]

Thanks Raul. They are directly connected with sata card to the motherboard. Totally 4 hdd, one 80gb for the OS and three 1TB for storage in zraid-1 (raid-5), the onboard controller is set to sata mode in bios. Motherboard Asus p5vdc-mx, cpu intel pentium 4 3.06 GHz, 1 GB RAM
The problem is with one from storage. Initially I had freenas 7.2 with softraid-5, but i wanted to upgrade to nas4free and zfs. Since the system was built (june or july 2011) I had sometimes problem with hdd, one from storage sometime disappeared after restart, if I took out and put back the sata cables from and to connectors the hdd was detected again. Another 2 main problems were with the very slow network transfer speed and with ups. When I copied the files from nas to pc for backup before software upgraid, the system had blocked and frozed on AHCI problem. After manual restart from reset button, the system made a raid integrity check as it did every time after unclean shutdown and after check I could continue the backup process.
After I started to copy back the stuff to the upgraded nas, the system blocked again, the issue was the same AHCI error.
This repeated after I restarted the system and started to copy again the files from were was interrupted.
I reinstalled after this the system with the latest nas4free version, at beginning was ok, but already in config stage after a restart the AHCI problem reappeared, I localized then the hdd which was missing, changed the cable - no result, I interchanged the sata ports between the hdd with OS and the hdd with problems - the problem moved to the ahci channel corresponding to the actual sata port of the hdd, SMART warning nothing on pc startup, Hiren's boot cd with HDAT didn't found any problem on it, but in NAS4Free it's still missing and at AHCI phase at loading the error with timeout is there.

[raulfg3]

After read your post ,and your spec. I think that perhaps you have mem. exhaust problems.

To use ZFS is recomended at least 2GB and 4 GB to work without problem and 8GB to work faster ( and 16GB or more to use advanced ZFS features like deduplication).

You actually have only 1GB, so please upgrade to 4GB if possible or at least to 2GB, and use zfskerntune to tune your ZFS variables to your real RAM.

if still have problems, perhaps you need to think in a new board , not the latest build, but a more new or at least that have a 1GB NIC ( you actually have 100MB) and a more compatible chipset ( Intel & AMD Chipset are the most compatible), yours are VIA chipset <- I have No experience with VIA chipset so I don't know if have problems or not in BSD.

[gazdika]

I have a gigabit nic too, with freenas 7.2 the performance was very poor, but after upgrade the results were far better then before, the 2nd frozing were when I was copying back the stuff to NAS. It deserves 5 office pc's, and is used for office purposes, storage for office documents. We have an Asus GX1026i 24+2 port switch, the NAS and the internal internet gateway is connected via the 2 gigabit ports/utp gigabit patch cable, the pc's are on 100 mbps ports.
I know that is not the best configuration for zfs at NAS, I recommended to my boss the full hardware upgrade or a fabric-built NAS, but they rejected the idea, on financial basis... I tried to explain them that will be problems etc, but they need remote access to the documents, so had no other choice. Now running since days around this hdd problem, dunno if the hdd is with problem, or only the cable&contact.

[gazdika]

HDD and cable replaced, but the AHCI problem persists...