What is the procedure if a drive is about to fail?

[Jasper9080]

In my use for a Plex server I have 3 16-18TB drives in a 4 bay TerraMaster HDD enclosure. They were originally set up with say TV on 1 drive and movies on a 2nd drive. Now I have added the TerraMaster and an additional 18TB drive with all 3 in a drive pool and equally balanced. My question is what do I do if 1 of the drives starts giving me symptoms that it is failing? Is it as simple as cloning the contents from the failing drive to a new drive?

[Shane]

Depends on what you mean by clone (and presuming the drive lasts long enough to clone everything on it).

If you're cloning the whole drive, then you'll want to stop the drivepool service while both are connected or clone it on a different machine so you don't confuse drivepool (and then Remove the old drive from the pool after you've disconnected the old drive).

If you're adding the new drive to the pool then manually copying/moving the content from the old poolpart folder to the new one, you'll want to stop the drivepool service or at least turn off balancing/placement while you're doing that (and then Remove the old drive from the pool after you've disconnected the old drive).

If you're just Adding the new drive to the pool then Removing the old drive from the pool, letting DrivePool handle moving everything (perhaps with the option to handle damaged drives ticked), then you don't need to stop the service, though this is slower than the above methods (unless the old drive had Duplication enabled in which case you can use the option to re-duplicate later which makes it much faster at the cost of temporarily lowering your duplication).

[Jasper9080]

16 hours ago, Shane said:

Depends on what you mean by clone (and presuming the drive lasts long enough to clone everything on it).

If you're cloning the whole drive, then you'll want to stop the drivepool service while both are connected or clone it on a different machine so you don't confuse drivepool (and then Remove the old drive from the pool after you've disconnected the old drive).

If you're adding the new drive to the pool then manually copying/moving the content from the old poolpart folder to the new one, you'll want to stop the drivepool service or at least turn off balancing/placement while you're doing that (and then Remove the old drive from the pool after you've disconnected the old drive).

If you're just Adding the new drive to the pool then Removing the old drive from the pool, letting DrivePool handle moving everything (perhaps with the option to handle damaged drives ticked), then you don't need to stop the service, though this is slower than the above methods (unless the old drive had Duplication enabled in which case you can use the option to re-duplicate later which makes it much faster at the cost of temporarily lowering your duplication).

By cloning I meant copying files from the bad drive to the good drive (if, like you mentioned, I have time to do that). I do not have duplication enabled. 

Thank you for the reply!