Replacing a Slice with Another Available Slice

You use the DiskSuite "metareplace" slice feature when replacing or swapping an existing slice with a different slice that is available and not in use on the system.

You can use this method when:

1. A disk drive has problems, and you don't have a replacement drive but you do have available slices elsewhere on the system. (You might want to do this if a replacement is absolutely necessary but you don't want to shut down the system.)

2. You are seeing soft errors. Physical disks may report soft errors even though DiskSuite shows the mirror/submirror or RAID5 metadevice in the "Okay" state. Replacing the slice in question with another available slice enables you to perform preventative maintenance and potentially prevent hard errors from occurring.

3. You want to do performance tuning. For example, by using DiskSuite Tool's performance monitor, you see that a particular slice in a RAID5 metadevice is experiencing a high load average, even though it's in the "Okay" state. To balance the load on the metadevice, you can replace that slice with one from a disk that is less utilized. This type of replacement can be performed online without interrupting service to the metadevice.

DiskSuite Tool enables you to replace an entire submirror if necessary. To do so, you create a new submirror (Concat/Stripe object) and drag it on top of the submirror to be replaced. This task is documented in "How to Replace a Submirror (DiskSuite Tool)".