In two of my servers that have backplanes, the method I've been using when I want to replace a drive with a larger one, has generally been easy and doesn't require a server reboot. When I put in the new drive, I simply do a refresh of the web gui and unassigned devices usually recognizes the drive and I can then add it to replace the drive I have removed. This didn't work under the current RC13 beta, I had to reboot the system. It's not a big deal, just not sure what about the beta caused this but being that it's a beta I suppose it could of been any number of things. I hope when 6.4 final is out this feature will return, it's quite convenient.

3 hours ago, ashman70 said:

In two of my servers that have backplanes, the method I've been using when I want to replace a drive with a larger one, has generally been easy and doesn't require a server reboot. When I put in the new drive, I simply do a refresh of the web gui and unassigned devices usually recognizes the drive and I can then add it to replace the drive I have removed. This didn't work under the current RC13 beta, I had to reboot the system. It's not a big deal, just not sure what about the beta caused this but being that it's a beta I suppose it could of been any number of things. I hope when 6.4 final is out this feature will return, it's quite convenient.

 

This is still the case, provided h/w supports hot-plugging.  However new device is not recognized unless array is Stopped.  If you have case where you hot plug new device and then Stop array and device is not recognized, please capture diags at that point and post.  thx

Thanks, in my case I did stop the array, as per usual, pulled the old drive, inserted the new drive and it's at this point I refresh and versions prior to 6.4RC work in terms of seeing the drive under unassigned devices, whereupon I can add it as a replacement to the drive I have removed.

1 hour ago, ashman70 said:

Thanks, in my case I did stop the array, as per usual, pulled the old drive, inserted the new drive and it's at this point I refresh and versions prior to 6.4RC work in terms of seeing the drive under unassigned devices, whereupon I can add it as a replacement to the drive I have removed.

 

This seems to completely work on our test servers.  Both with SATA and SAS attached devices, HDD and SSD.  After hotplugging a new device it sometimes take the linux block i/o layer some time to bring up the new device, in our case up to around 30 secs.  I also saw a case where drive was not recognized due to "already having ID assigned".  But unplug/replug/wait seemed to solve that.  This is on latest 6.4.0-rc15 with linux kernel 4.14.3.