What You See:
- You swapped in a replacement drive
- The rebuild doesn’t start automatically
- Controller says “Degraded” or “Ready,” but no rebuild begins
- Sometimes: “Inconsistent configuration,” “Not enough drives,” or no message at all
What It Likely Means:
- One of the “online” drives was already degraded silently
- The rebuild logic needs both parity and data lanes — and something is missing
- Your replacement disk may not be blank or healthy
- The controller doesn’t trust the current configuration
What NOT To Do:
- Don’t swap in another drive blindly — that can cause multi-disk mismatch
- Don’t force the rebuild unless all metadata is verified
- Don’t assume silence means success — RAID 6 can appear stable while degraded
What You CAN Do:
- Use JeannieLite to snapshot current disk roles and parity maps
- Check SMART logs and controller events for pre-failure warnings
- Confirm the replacement drive is truly empty and not preformatted
- Label all drives and avoid hot-swapping again without a map
RAID 6 can technically survive two disk losses — but not if those losses are sequential and unverified.
If rebuild won’t start, it’s a signal — not a glitch.