On Thursday 30 January 2025 16:55:00 Greenwich Mean Time gevisz wrote: [snip ...]
> 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! With ZFS you should probably have used the unique device ID obtained by running: lsblk -o name,wwn My ZFS experience is cursory to know it if makes a material difference, but according to the Gentoo wiki page this is what OpenZFS prefers: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ZFS#Preparing_disk > 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! When USB drives are plugged in, or the system boots with a USB drive already plugged in, they may not be detected in the same order against other connected drives and their logical device name can change e.g. from /dev/sdb to /dev/ sdc. However, this will not stop a HDD from being detected. Its logical name may change, but the disk by-id and wwn will not. > The situation remained the same even after swapping the > undetected 500GB WD HDD with the one. > > So, I wonder if it is a fault of > 1) refurbished WD HDDs Run smartctl tests to see what they detect. Any error reported indicates a hardware problem. > 2) my almost 20 years old Ultra-Durable Gigabyte motherboard Try a different SATA port and cable from what you've been using so far to connect the second hard drive. Either may be faulty. > 3) the Linux system itself. Highly unlikely, but booting with a liveUSB will soon confirm this.
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