I discovered something tonight that was a pleasant surprise. I had read that V5 didn't support "hot swapping" of disks. I am using a Norco case with backplanes that support hot swapping and am running ESX. What I have been doing is putting in new drives, stopping the server, then doing a reboot. Tonight after stopping the server cleanly I clicked on one of the drop-downs and got a pleasant surprise - the new disks I'd had just added to the array were showing as available with blue balls. I selected each of them and after making sure they were correct started the array. The array appears to be starting cleanly and it's presently clearing my new HDD - sweet! Restarting unRAID with ESX isn't very hard but not having to actually go through a boot sequence is even better and IMO should also work for those not running ESX. Very cool :-) I'll post back if anything goes boom but right now things appear to be clearing just fine!

That is not a "hot swap", it is more like a "warm swap"

The unRAID array MUST be stopped when you swap in/out drives.

This is only supported in later 5.0-beta/rc releases.

 

Joe L.

Well okay, I'll agree that it wasn't exactly on the fly but it was certainly a surprise and a pleasant one at that :-) Hopefully all went well and I can migrate some data over to it today. I'm running rc8 and so far it's been quite stable for me.