Hard Drive Questions

[foo_fighter]

The Maxtor drives I just ordered(maxline pro) support raid pattern fill. Will unraid take advantage of this to reduce the clearing phase time?

 

From the documentation:

The clearing phase is necessary to preserve the fault tolerance characteristic of the array. If at any time while the new disk(s) is being cleared, one of the other disks fails, you will still be able to recover the data of the failed disk. Unfortunately, the clearing phase can take several hours depending on the size of the new disks(s).The capacity of any new disk(s) added must be the same

 

Second, drive sizes vary slightly from manufacturer to manufacturer. If I add another 500gb drive, and it's a little larger, will I have to swap it with the parity drive first?

 

 

 

[musicmann]

I don't know the answer to the first question, but for the second questions, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, you will have to swap if the new drive is slightly larger.  UnRaid should give a warning if this is necessary.