A feature request that falls under the usability category:

Override of "This disk is larger than parity drive" error -- one should be able to use a drive larger than parity.  Of course, the new disks' bytes that are beyond the parity disk size should be unavailable, and this can be made clear when selecting this option.

 

Why?

 

I had a failing drive that was 244GB formatted, 250GB unformatted.  So, to replace it, I selected another 250GB unformatted drive that I had, but it formatted out to 245GB.  I couldn't use it.  My solution was to take a 325GB HD and install it as parity drive, but because of the failing drive it would have taken about a week to rebuild parity.  I ended up shutting down the array, installing the 245GB drive, copying over what I could and re-download the remainder and then rebuilt parity.

 

If this feature was available, I would have simply installed the larger drive, and then rebuilt data on the new drive.  Not sure if this is technically feasible, but it would have saved a lot of angst/time.

 

Lesson learned:

Make your parity drive as large as you can afford -- and significantly larger than any of your other drives!

The other thing you could have done is called "parity swap".  You remove the failing drive and replace it with your current parity drive.  Then put your new drive into the parity slot.  The system detects this condition and will copy the contents of the old parity (now the new data disk) to the new parity disk, and then rebuild the original data disk.

The other thing you could have done is called "parity swap".  You remove the failing drive and replace it with your current parity drive.  Then put your new drive into the parity slot.  The system detects this condition and will copy the contents of the old parity (now the new data disk) to the new parity disk, and then rebuild the original data disk.

 

I saw the option for it, but could not figure out how to do it.  I assume you mean that one has to physically remove/replace the drives, right?

 

I'll add this to the wiki so someone can benefit from my experience.   Thanks Tom!

I could be wrong, but I think all you have to do is assign the parity drive in the web interface, and assign the old parity drive as your failing drive (e.g., disk x ).