Short version: I bought an 8TB WD red to upgrade my parity disk. The old parity (5TB WD red) was unassigned, system was turned off, new drive added, and restarted. But no matter what I do it won't recognize the new drive via the webui. Thought it might be faulty, so I took it back and got a new 8TB red, but same result. Any ideas?
Long version: I've had the server for 4 years and have added 5TB drives to it (mostly WD Greens with headparking disabled) with no issue over the years. Last week, I found some of the blue lights above the Icy dock bays off and the server was telling me it couldn't find the parity disk and another data disk. I discovered the disks were fine, but the something with the Icy Dock bay failed. No biggie as I only had 6 disks total and 4 icy dock bays with 5 slots each (20 total). So I moved the disks to new slots and all the disks worked. But somewhere in the process I unassigned the parity drive. I'd already bought the new WD red 8TB so figured it would just be a good chance to upgrade the parity disk. At first it recognized the 8TB wd red, but I took it out to disable headparking (I know, the Reds are already set to 300 seconds) and also to wait for a covenant time to take down the array to rebuild the parity.
I couldn't get WDIDLE to work on the 8TB red so I gave up and figured I would live with the 300 second head parking, but afterward the server stopped recognizing the new 8TB drive altogether. Thought it might have failed so I exchanged it for a new 8TB red. But same result with the 2nd 8TB red.
At this point, the server is running fine, but doesn't have a parity disk. The old parity (5TB red) is listed as basically an unformatted 6th disk. I would like to figure out how to get the server to recognize the new 8TB red so I can make it the new parity disk. After that, I will format the old 5TB red to be a data disk. Any help is MUCH appreciated!! Thank you.