The small correction: the penultimate sentence of my previous email should read: "The situation remained the same even after swapping the undetected 500GB WD HDD with the spare one."
чт, 30 янв. 2025 г. в 18:55, gevisz <gev...@gmail.com>: > > About half a year ago my old 1.5TB SATA Green WD HDD > tapped me on the shoulder and said: "Hi, very soon you won't > be able to read any data from me." > > As I have not made my backups regularly, I took this warning > seriously and decided to finally realize my old idea of moving > from ext4 to ZFS. > > So, I have bought a 500GB SATA Green WD HDD. > Based on its price, I suspected it was refurbished, > but I didn't have much choice since the Green WD HDDs > were apparently no longer in production, and > the 2TB Gold WD HDD was incomparably more expensive. > > After installing ZFS on it, it turned out that everything works well. > So, I decided to buy two other WD HDD of the same model, > to set one of them as a ZFS mirror and leave the third WD HDD > for the time when one of its twin brothers fails. > > This time the seller warned me that these WD HDDs > are refurbished but assured me that they were refurbished > by WD itself. Taking into account that the previous such HDD > behaved quite well, I decided to proceed with my purchase. > > After setting up one of them as a ZFS mirror, I immediately > got the problem that if I boot my system with additional HDD > connected to my computer, one of these ZFS mirror disks > is not detected and the corresponding zpool appears to be degraded. > > I have realized that it was my fault to use /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc > notations when setting up the ZFS mirror because with more disks > at the boot time these notations may change. > > I should have used /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD5000* notations instead! > > Unfortunately, I have not found the way to change these notations > other than deleting the whole zpool and re-creating it anew with > the notations /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD5000*, which took quite > a lot of time. > > Presumably, the problem with detecting my ZFS mirror HDDs > should have disappeared after that because now the disks were > referred to by their ids but unfortunately it was not the case. > > When I boot my computer with an additional external HDD > attached to the computer via USB, one of my ZFS mirror HDDs > is not detected by the system and the corresponding zpool again > appears to be degraded until I restart my computer in the usual > setup, that is, without any additional HDD attached to it. > > I have looked into my /dev/disk/by-id/ directory and found out > that this happens because one of these ZFS mirror HDDs > does not appear in this directory at all! > > The situation remained the same even after swapping the > undetected 500GB WD HDD with the spare one. > > So, I wonder if it is a fault of > 1) refurbished WD HDDs > 2) my almost 20 years old Ultra-Durable Gigabyte motherboard > 3) the Linux system itself.
