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How to rebuild a RAID 1 array in FreeNAS

See my thread here on how to set up a FreeNAS server.

• How to install and configure a FreeNAS 0.7.2 / 8.0 box - SMB, Local users and RAID 1

The whole reason of having a RAID 1 setup is that is offers you protection incase one of your drives fails. My drive didn't fail but I performed a little test on my own box to ensure that It'd rebuild the array incase it ever did fail.
Not like FreeNAS 8.0, where the server wouldn't even boot when a drive failed..


My FreeNAS server contains 2x 1TB Sammy F3 drives. As you know SATA drives are hot swappable, this means that you can pull them from machines while they're still on and not cause problems, this is exactly what I did.

I simply unplugged the top hard drive in my case, went to Disk > Management and was presented with this.




"OH CRAP! One of my drives is missing, I better alert the authorities and call round the neighbours house." Disks > Software RAID. Your RAID will be degraded.




My top hard drive is named "ad10", Disks > Software RAID > Tools. Select the missing drive, forget then hit send command.




Insert a "new" drive, if your drive really has failed, select it, then hit insert.




Give it 5 minutes, select the drive again and hit status. You should see a percentage next to the new drive, this is it re-building.




Note: It WILL takes HOURS to re-build your array. I had a small amount of data and it still look a few hours.



:thumbs

Just a note on this, I'm in the middle of rebuilding my server as I type this. Before I could "insert" the new disk into the Array I had to go to Disks > Management > Rescan disks to pick it back up before I could insert it.

You are also missing an apostrophe.