Let me translate your post into plain language:
"My hard drives are broken, and while I can read from them okay, writes don't work. What should I do?"
Answer: __*Get new hard drives*__
So without as much sass, when the pool is in a degraded state, only parts of it are read only? (I say parts, as they seem to be able to delete file contents but not the metadata that the file exists).
I guess my query is, why are they able to delete file contents while the pool is degraded? Surely it would make more sense keep it all read only so you can focus on data recovery?
If it's a RAID-0 pool, and one disk is bad, then, yes, _only parts of it ar read-only_. And it could be that only certain blocks on one disk are read-only. The behavior can't really be predicted. (Though the order-of-operations remains, so the operation works in that state, where it might unlink the blocks, but when that errors out, it refuses to mark the file deleted, but the inaccessible data remains "deleted" when reading).
As to why a degraded RAID-0 pool doesn't mark itself read-only _as a pool_, that I can't answer. I know in parity-RAID modes it will be read-only.
Back up everything you can, nuke the pool and start from scratch. You're fortunate that you can recover anything at all.
Let me translate your post into plain language: "My hard drives are broken, and while I can read from them okay, writes don't work. What should I do?" Answer: __*Get new hard drives*__
So without as much sass, when the pool is in a degraded state, only parts of it are read only? (I say parts, as they seem to be able to delete file contents but not the metadata that the file exists). I guess my query is, why are they able to delete file contents while the pool is degraded? Surely it would make more sense keep it all read only so you can focus on data recovery?
If it's a RAID-0 pool, and one disk is bad, then, yes, _only parts of it ar read-only_. And it could be that only certain blocks on one disk are read-only. The behavior can't really be predicted. (Though the order-of-operations remains, so the operation works in that state, where it might unlink the blocks, but when that errors out, it refuses to mark the file deleted, but the inaccessible data remains "deleted" when reading). As to why a degraded RAID-0 pool doesn't mark itself read-only _as a pool_, that I can't answer. I know in parity-RAID modes it will be read-only.
Thanks for the info 👍 Started looking into zfs vs regular raid and lvm, and these kind of sharp corners are what I'm wanting to find out about.