I have a failed 3TB drive, a parity of 12TB, and a replacement drive that I had sitting and just shucked that is 14TB. I think it would be wisest to purchase a new 20-22TB drive and replace the parity with it, then add the parity as a drive in the array and save the 14TB as a spare drive, or transfer the 3TB of data to one of the other drives, let the parity rebuild and wait till a deal no a larger drive. I am also thinking of putting in an SSD for audio/music. Any good reason to do something else? Suggestions on when these larger drives go on sale or should I just put a deal alert on slickdeals or some other website? Thanks for helping brainstorm and work through this. 

Edited May 13, 20242 yr by xdriver
update info

If you have only the failed 3 and the parity 12, and want to keep the data from the 3, I believe you'll have to either replace the 3 with a new 3-12 disk or transfer data from the unprotected array to another location (network, unassigned device) and rebuild your array later. If you have more disks in the array with enough free space, you could move data from the failed disk (parity calculated) to the working disks. Probably pretty slow, with high parity utilization. But with no other device smaller than 12, you'd  have to break the array and rebuild it anyhow, 

Lacking a smaller (3-12) drive, I would probably move data from failed disk to other disks in array, break array, remove 3, reuse 12 as array disk and add 14 as parity. Then purchase new 14 as spare, or possibly a pair of large disks at future opportunity to replace parity and spare disk. 

Lars Olof

 

I am thinking I may move the data from the  "virtual?" 3TB disk onto the array since I have space, get a large 20-22TB drive and install it and have the parity get rebuilt on that new larger drive and save the 14TB as a spare. Thanks Larson