[Clone and swap identical drive?]

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

Only if your server has some controller or other bottleneck, if not the rebuild is limited by the disk maximum speed, it can also be a little slower if you have many different capacity disks and the one you want to replace it's not one of the smaller ones.

Oh I see.  Well this is the largest size disk at 8TB and my parity rebuilds run about 128MB/s at the moment. A standard rebuild is certainly easier to run, too.

[Clone and swap identical drive?]

25 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Why not just rebuild? You can do a clone but for parity to remain valid the array will need to be offline during it, disk needs to be the exact same size and you'd need to a new config once it's done.

I could rebuild, sure. But if I have an identical drive and can take the array offline, a clone would be much faster wouldn’t it?  Assuming it could be done. 

[Clone and swap identical drive?]

I have a working drive in my array that has some physical damage. It works for now but I want to swap while I have a chance. 
 

I have a spare identical model drive. Can I remove the damaged one and clone it to my spare and just swap it in?

 

Would the array not understand the new serial number and assume the old one is missing?