I currently have 2x14 TB drives as parity, I'm bumping both of those to 24TB so I can start to add 24 TB drives down the road instead of 14s. Now how can I go about this without days of downtime.

• Since it's dual parity I'm guessing I can swap 1 new drive in for one and let it do its thing and add parity info to the new disk then swap the other 14 TB drive. Question is will the array be able to operate during this time?

• Does prefill/clear help here?

• Better suggestions?

Thanks

Yes, the array will operate as normal when upgrading drives.

If you want you can upgrade both drives at the same time, BUT not recommended since you're unprotected if a drive fails during the rebuild. So upgrade one at the time. You'll have to do two rebuilds, but as mentioned the array is operational during the rebuild so there's really no downtime. It could be wise to minimize writes to the array tho, as writes to the array will slow down the rebuild. But if it were me I wouldn't care about it and just run the server as normal. It just takes a bit longer, but hey, who are we racing anyway?? :P You have extra protection in the second parity drive so no need to rush it.

And preclear won't help when upgrading parity drives, it only helps on data disks.

9 hours ago, spartanooof said:

Does prefill/clear help here?

Prefill only helps when adding a drive to a new slot in the array. Any sort of rebuild overwrites every sector on the drive so the existing contents are irrelevant.

The other reason for running a prefill can be to stress test a drive before using it in the array.