raidz from 4 disk to 3 is it possible?

Darkmagister

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Jun 3, 2024
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i've been using my old hardware to run proxmox with 4 hdd in a raidz, as i'm using sole old hardware to do some test with proxmox one disk have failed an now the zpool is degraded, unfortunatelly i don't have any other disk that i can change it with, so as raidz can work with 3 disk minimum and i have a lot of free space, is it possible to tell zpool that now i only have 3 disk? so i can still loose one ? or do i need to delete and recreate it entirely?

thanks a lot
 
You may be able to replace a failed disk in the pool with a sparse file on e.g. an XFS filesystem with sufficient free space (or even an iscsi drive in a real emergency), but you need to find money from somewhere and replace the failed disk ASAP. You do not want to run for long with a degraded pool, especially if you don't have backups!

https://superuser.com/questions/281832/start-a-zfs-raidz-zpool-with-two-discs-then-add-a-third

This is a temporary jackleg solution and may not survive a reboot. I wouldn't rely on it for more than about a week, and that with light I/O

With that said, also buy a cheap large usb drive and at least back up what you can to that.
 
Last edited:
Maybe one more Tip.
People (me in the beginnings either) are fixed to buy the exact same drive as replacement.

Let me say it that way:
If you can get a larger/better disk, same or more cachesize... So in general if specs are at least same, or better...
Most important is that the new disk is Bigger.
Thats a better way usually.

If you replaced at some day in the future, all 4... You can tell ZFS to autogrow. So it will grow to the smallest disk.

Otherwise do what previous posters said, there is no other way.
Cheers
 
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