Switched On Tech Design

Tag: scrub

  • ZFS: Stopping a scrub

    If you accidentally started a scrub on a pool or need to stop one for any reason it’s fortunately quite straightforward:

     

    # zpool scrub -s [poolname]

     

     

    e.g. zpool scrub -s kepler

     

    You can check on whether that was successful with zpool status – it will give an output above the pool status that looks like:

     

    pool: kepler
    state: ONLINE
    scan: scrub canceled on Sat Sep 29 10:30:14 2012

     

    Unnecessary scrubbing just wastes power – particularly for a large, nearly-full array where you’ll have quite a few disks running constantly for hours – so it’s good practice to cancel an accidentally-started scrub.

  • ZFS Basics – zpool scrubbing

    One of the most significant features of the ZFS filesystem is scrubbing. This is where the filesystem checks itself for errors and attempts to heal any errors that it finds. It’s generally a good idea to scrub consumer-grade drives once a week, and enterprise-grade drives once a month.

     

    How long the scrub takes depends on how much data is in your pool; ZFS only scrubs sectors where data is present so if your pool is mostly empty it will be finished fairly quickly. Time taken is also dependent on drive and pool performance; an SSD pool will scrub much more quickly than a spinning disk pool!

     

    To scrub, run the following command:

     

    # zpool scrub [poolname]

     

    Replace [poolname] with the name of your pool. You can check the status of your scrub via:

     

    # zpool status

     

    The output will look something like this:

     

    pool: seleucus
    state: ONLINE
    scan: scrub in progress since Tue Sep 18 21:14:37 2012
    1.18G scanned out of 67.4G at 403M/s, 0h2m to go
    0 repaired, 1.75% done
    config:

    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    seleucus    ONLINE       0     0     0
    mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
    sdh     ONLINE       0     0     0
    sdk     ONLINE       0     0     0

    errors: No known data errors

     

    Scrubbing has a low priority so if the drives are being accessed while the scrub is happening there should be less impact on performance. It’s a good idea to automate the scrubbing process in case you forget – we will do a later post on just how to do that!