[OpenIndiana-discuss] Resilver restarting on second dead drive?

[Eric A. Borisch]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:50 PM, David Brodbeck <brodbd at uw.edu> wrote:
> In my experience it's often the resilvering process that triggers the
> failure of the second drive -- and this is an issue with RAID in general,
> not just with ZFS.  The reason is you're suddenly forcing a read of all the
> the data on all the remaining drives, and this can uncover latent failures.
>  It's also not that uncommon for a hotspare to turn out to be bad -- after
> all, it's been spinning just as long as the rest of the disks.
>
> This is, incidentally, why I don't run single-parity RAID anymore.  That
> and I like to stay in bed at night. ;)
>
> --
> David Brodbeck
> System Administrator, Linguistics
> University of Washington

And this is a great argument (IMHO) for running periodic scrubs of
your zpools! Then when you actually need to re-silver it's not a
'never tried that before' stressor for the system.

 -Eric