1st question, can I swap a 6TB failed drive with 2TB of used space with a 4TB drive I have laying around. I've always taken the opportunity to replace failed drive with larger ones.

If that isn't possible, then I'd like to just remove the disabled drive completely I have plenty of storage space without the disk and just want to remove it from the array.

If my poor search skills in the forum have come up with the correct results, I can't just do this. Is that correct? The data on that drive would be lost with a parity rebuild after setting up the new config. Therefore, Is is possible to use unbalance or some other plugin to move all the data from the "emulated" drive to another drive. Then remove it and create a new config and a new parity?

From my past drive failures the easiest way to fix this it to just replace the drive, assign the new drive to the old one, and let the parity rebuild the drive and I'm good to go. I'd rather save my money at this point as I don't have a drive to replace it with.

Thanks for your advice and sharing your knowledge?

tower-diagnostics-20251003-1700.zip

8 hours ago, gath2 said:

can I swap a 6TB failed drive with 2TB of used space with a 4TB drive I have laying around.

Not directly, but you could mount the 4TB drive with UD, copy all the data from the emulated disk there, then do a new config with it as part of the array; parity will need to be resynchronized.