I made probably my biggest, most costly mistake recently. I was upgrading my case to cool my drives better, but when re-connecting the HDD power connectors, I got my modular cables mixed up (they look exactly the same) and I ended up using cables from a Thermaltake 600W Gold PSU when my server uses a Seasonic 550W Gold PSU.

 

Initially, the server wouldn't even power on (the fans would flicker once but that's it). I eventually figured out the cables were the problem, and I've since been told what I did was extremely dangerous for my hard drives and could easily brick one.

 

Sure enough, one of them did brick, but the rest are fine. My question is, with the presumably irregular voltage they were taking in, will that likely have any long-term effects on the drives? Are they now more likely to fail in the future or have some kind of data loss? The still seem to be functioning normally now and I haven't noticed any data loss.

Also, does the replacement drive have to be the exact same size as the failed drive? Or can it be any size above the used space?

Just now, Stubbs said:

Also, does the replacement drive have to be the exact same size as the failed drive? Or can it be any size above the used space?

A replacement drive can be larger than the failed drive as long as it is not larger than the smallest parity drive.

 

in the special case where you want to replace a parity drive with a larger one and use the old parity drive as the replacement drive you can use the Parity Swap procedure.

4 minutes ago, itimpi said:

A replacement drive can be larger than the failed drive as long as it is not larger than the smallest parity drive.

 

in the special case where you want to replace a parity drive with a larger one and use the old parity drive as the replacement drive you can use the Parity Swap procedure.

Can it be smaller?

What if I wanted to replace a 10TB drive with an 8TB drive?

30 minutes ago, Stubbs said:

Can it be smaller?

What if I wanted to replace a 10TB drive with an 8TB drive?

No