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.

  • vsis@feddit.clEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Do you really need the RAID online all the time? Because if you can afford to shut it down for a few hours, it is way less work to do a backup, and then build a new RAID with your SSDs.

    I’m not sure if the RAID controller will like two different kind of drives. I’d check the docs if it says something.