Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 06:25:25 -0700 From: Chris Pratt <eagletree@hughes.net> To: FreeBSD-Questions Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Using mirroring to replace drive? Message-ID: <7331B81C-7229-40A6-9B5D-2B5B45071CF3@hughes.net>
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Hi, For years I've been upgrading by building a temp server, transferring a production function to it and temporarily decommissioning the one server while I upgrade and rebuild it. I was thinking of trying a different approach since having tried out gvinum in the last couple of years. The current scenario is that I have a machine where the adaptec controller is suggesting I replace a failing SCSI drive which happens to be the system disk. I purchased a couple of new drives and thought I might just plug it in and mirror the failing drive on the new drive. Then pull the failing drive and plug in the other new drive as the second mirrored drive and be done with it. One obvious outcome would be a having a system drive mirror for future such issues. I have never built a mirror on the fly but it seems many have from what I've read and the cookbooks out there make it sound very easy. I was going to use GEOM Mirror on 6.2 (then upgrade to 7.0 after establishing the new good drives). 1. Is this an appropriate way to deal with this? 2. Are there any high risk aspects of doing this while running a server in production? I'm thinking of things like how probable it is of trashing the original disk, making the system unbootable in the process etc? 3. Are there better approaches that are safer (aside from my normal hardware swap MO). 4. Does using GEOM Mirror RAID-1 make the upgrade from 6.2 to 7.0 a dangerous proposition. I do upgrades via cvsup and buildworld. The environment is FreeBSD 6.2 Supermicro with Adaptec SCSI All ~73 GB Maxtor and Seagate drives Current da0 system is Maxtor, there will be minor size differences, the replacement Cheetah is a hair larger. Apache, PHP5 and Mysql No existing RAID Configuration
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