Well, it was bound to happen, folks! One of my drives died! After building a storage server, I installed TrueNAS Scale, which was virtualized on Proxmox and I proceeded to build a large drive pool, made out of 20 HDDs. At the time, I was unaware that two Vdevs would be better for this type of configuration but nevertheless, I used it with this configuration.
Now it’s time to replace the drive and start the resilvering process. While at this, I will be also upgrading my zpool with an extra 250gb SSD drive for Cache.
Because I’m running on a RAIDZ-2 Configuration, I was able to run on a degraded pool in order to replace my bad disk and start resilvering.
To replace the failed HDD on Proxmox, you will need to physically replace the failed drive with a new one and then add the new drive to the RAID array or storage pool. Here are the steps you can follow:
- Identify the failed drive using the
lsblkcommand or the disk management interface in Proxmox.
lsblk- Power off the Proxmox server and replace the failed drive with a new one.
- Open the Proxmox web interface and navigate to the “Datacenter” or “Storage” view.
- In the “Edit storage” dialog, scroll down to the “Disks” section and click on the “Add” button.
- Select the new drive from the list of available disks and click “Add”.
- Afterwards, you’re clear to add the new drive to your TrueNAS Scale configuration and then go into your TrueNAS Scale Web GUI and add the new disk to your degraded pool. From there, it should automatically start resilvering and depending on your pool size and use, it can take from 6 hours up to several days. So buckle up and hope for the best!
For me, it only took around 5 hours, granted my pool only had about 7 TB of usage, out of 50 TB.
Additionally, it’s always a good idea to have a backup of your data in case of multiple drive failures or other issues.
You need to understand that this process only applies to configurations similar to mine, where True NAS Scale is virtualized on Proxmox 7.4-3, all your HDDs are passed through from Proxmox to the VM and then your pool is created inside the VM as a RAIDZ-2.
Anyway, that’s about it! Hope this helps someone out there with the same issue as mine and will make their life a bit easier when trying to recover a degraded pool.