HI there, 

I have a few 4TB HDDs (EMPTY) in my array and want to replace those with a 8TB one without rebuilding. is that possible? from my understanding I can only replace one HDD at a time (because of 1 level parity). So i would have to rebuilt those empty drives for every single swapped HDD which really makes no sense (because they are empty and because it would strain every HDD at rebuilding for a day).

 

best wishes.

Edited August 30, 20241 yr by naddel81

You have to rebuild something. Either the drives or parity.

If the drives are trusted and you want to replace multiple then just do so then rebuild parity using the New config tool.

19 minutes ago, naddel81 said:

(because they are empty and because it would strain every HDD at rebuilding for a day).

 

Just because they have no files does not mean they are not part of parity.  Only a drive that has all sectors set to zeroes does not affect the parity calculations.  The moment a drive is formatted it is no longer all zeroes because of the fact that you have created the directory structure ready to receive files.

I guess I will swap one HDD at a time and only when needed. this way I keep the other drives parity protected. how often do you „stress“ your drive with parity procedure? once a year?

Edited August 30, 20241 yr by naddel81

1 hour ago, naddel81 said:

how often do you „stress“ your drive with parity procedure?

Most do parity checks once a month, but if all your drives are active most of the time and you have notifications working so you can act on any errors, you can extend that if you wish.

 

The biggest reason to do a parity check is to ensure all your drives are 100% healthy across the entire surface, which is what is required to do a recovery of 1 failed drive. Also, if you do ever see parity errors, it means that until parity is correct, a failed drive rebuild will not be fully accurate.