I just did swap disabled on a drive and put in a larger 3TB drive in place of a failed one, and the 3TB was bigger than parity so I swapped them. Copying parity worked great (rc-11). Now I'm rebuilding data to the old parity drive (new data drive). The disk that was failing doesn't show up in an fdisk -l anymore and also I can't see my cache drive for some reason. It probably wasn't there when I started the array and I just wasn't paying attention. Well something is making an awful noise in the box and I was wondering if it would be ok for me to stop the rebuild, shut the box down, and remove the bad hdd. Then start it back up and start the data rebuild again. There's nothing on that hard drive I'd be devastated to lose. But if it's going to come back up and not let me start a rebuild again I don't want to do that. But I also don't want a hdd seizing up inside there. What do you all think?

Holy cow, and I was just playing around with this myMain plugin in unmenu and saw my old parity drive said " load_cycle_count=217357". That seems really really high based on a small amount of googling. Is that because WD is trying to save energy or something? Should I be worried. I certainly probably should have created a new post...

 

EDIT: It's a WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0. I'll search around once I'm done playing with this kid.

I went ahead and stopped it. That drive was definitely making a grinding noise. Powered back up and it started the array and restarted the data rebuild like I was thinking it would. So to answer my own question: stopping the data rebuild in my unique case was ok. I certainly wouldn't risk stopping the parity copy during a swap-disable procedure though.