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 “Right answer” is copy all the content to another device, upgrade disks, copy content back to new array that can take advantage of the larger disks. Or even safer, set up a completely new device in parallel and then copy data over, decommission the old device.
Some RAID systems will let you do what you say, but will not let you expand the usable storage space. Some will have particular disks they’ll even take. It really depends on the RAID system.