I’d like to swap my spinning disks with SSD drives. I have the new disks and they’re just larger than the old ones. My configuration is a RAID-5 with 3 disks (and one hot spare). Can I hot swap a single disk (HDD to SSD), wait for the new disk to rebuild, then repeat?
I’m thinking that I’d mark down the hot spare, replace it with an SSD, mark the SSD as hot spare, mark HDD 1 as “bad” causing the hot spare to activate, then repeat for the other 2 HDDs. I don’t have a lot of experience with RAID, but did perform a single disk swap once with success.
If this is a bad idea, why? What’s the best way to upgrade?
I’m not sure if this is the right community for this question. If not, please guide me to the right one.
The answer to this is going to depend on your raid controller. Frequently the answer is yes, but some raid controllers are more particular about exactly what drives are in the array. Software raid controllers are typically more forgiving of this type of change.