Recover after Hardware Failure

Distributed MinIO deployments rely on Erasure Coding to provide built-in tolerance for multiple drive or node failures. Depending on the deployment topology and the selected erasure code parity, MinIO can tolerate the loss of up to half the drives or nodes in the deployment while maintaining read access (“read quorum”) to objects.

The following table lists the typical types of failure in a MinIO deployment and links to procedures for recovering from each:

Since MinIO can operate in a degraded state without significant performance loss, administrators can schedule hardware replacement in proportion to the rate of hardware failure. “Normal” failure rates (single drive or node failure) may allow for a more reasonable replacement timeframe, while “critical” failure rates (multiple drives or nodes) may require a faster response.

For nodes with one or more drives that are either partially failed or operating in a degraded state (increasing drive errors, SMART warnings, timeouts in MinIO logs, etc.), you can safely unmount the drive if the cluster has sufficient remaining healthy drives to maintain read and write quorum. Missing drives are less disruptive to the deployment than drives that are consistently producing read and write errors.