What's the best way to completely destroy a pool?

[Jasper]

Disaster has struck.

 

I've just complete putting together a 10.2TB pool. Everything was rosy until Duplication finished this morning. I was shocked to discover that the largest drive in the pool, a 5TB WL drive, was in failure mode. According to HD Sentinel, health was at 26% and it had 101 bad sectors. I'm currently running a read surface scan (non destructive) and it's looking like Swiss cheese. Lots of hard to read sectors and it hasn't even hit the bad ones yet.

 

At this point I don't trust the pool at all. I'd like to zero it out and start over again. Fortunately, all 10.2TB is safely backed up on another server so nothing is lost.

 

So what's the best way to zero out a pool? I want to do a full format on the remaining drives also.

 

Thanks

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, first, I'm sorry to hear about the drive, as that is never a pleasant experience.

 

 

As for destroying the pool, you can just format all of the drives in the pool. This will essentially destroy the pool. Once the last disk is formatted, the service will remove the Pool.

 

However, if the data on the other drives is fine, you could just remove the specific disk from the system, and let StableBit DrivePool handle reduplicating the data. You can do this by physically disconnecting the disk, and then removing the now missing disk from the pool. Or you can remove the disk (using the "duplicate later" and "force damaged drive removal" options).

 

 

Additionally, we would recommend installing StableBit Scanner. It routinely runs a surface scan and file system scan (every 30 days, by default).  Additionally, if StableBit Scanner detects unreadable sectors, it will automatically evacuate the contents of the drive if it is in a pool (to prevent further issues with your data).

[Jasper]

Thanks. The drive has been replaced and DP is redupping as I type.

 

The drive that failed was a 5TB White Label drive. I have 2 of these and after this failure I did a surface scan on the other using HD Sentinel and it checked out perfect. So I guess WL drives are hit or miss. Glad to know recovery is as easy as it is.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, we've designed recovery to be as simple as possible, so we're glad that you appreciate that!

 

 

As for the White Label drive, how did it fail specifically?

[Jasper]

HD Sentinel said it was perfect before duplication and after duplication health was down to 26% and it had 101 bad sectors. I have no doubt that had I done a surface scan before dup the errors would have surfaced then. Duplication didn't cause the to fail, the flaws were already there. I almost hate to do a surface scan on a HD for fear of what it will reveal.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Ah, okay, so there definitely was an issue beforehand.

 

 

As for the surface scan, I know what you mean. But ... wouldn't it be better to know how healthy the disk is, before using it?

[Jasper]

Yep, you're right. Would have saved me a bunch of grief.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yup. Though it does suck to see that you have bad drives, regardless.

 

But that does happen. They wear down over time, unfortunately.