ZFS says drive is faulted, does that always mean it needs replacing?
My weekly zpool scrub came back with this:
pool: blackhole
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices are faulted in response to persistent errors.
Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a
degraded state.
action: Replace the faulted device, or use 'zpool clear' to mark the device
repaired.
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 02:01:59 with 0 errors on Tue Jul 11 04:02:09 2023
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
blackhole DEGRADED 0 0 0
raidz1-0 DEGRADED 0 0 0
ata-WDC_WD120EDAZ-11F3RA0_5PG8DYKC ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-WDC_WD120EFBX-68B0EN0_5QKJ6M8B ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-WDC_WD120EFBX-68B0EN0_5QKJTT8B FAULTED 51 0 0 too many errors
errors: No known data errors
I only got the drive 6 months ago, well within WD's 3 year warranty so I opened a support case, but do errors like this basically always mean the drive is its way out or is it possible to have false positives?
I think it's possible to have false-positives. Like gabriele97@lemmy.g97.top said above, do a clear and scrub to see if that helps. It happened to me last month after some really intensive disk i/o and AI stuff and I did that and the drive hasn't had an issue since.
Additionally, I plugged in one of my old, supposedly faulted drives from last year as an external drive on my desktop to test it out, and it is still working fine months later, so yeah, it appears that there is some possibility for false-positives.
Like another person said, make sure you have good backups and that the other drives are solid, but I'd take a wait-and-see approach.