Rebuilding after swapping hard drive?

General
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1

I have four 20TB Exos drives and one 20TB IronWolf drive which was added after the four Exos. I want to replace the IronWolf with another 20TB Exos. Can I just shutdown the DS1522+, pull the IronWoft, replace it with the new Exos and it will rebuild whatever was on the IronWolf? Since the IronWolf was added last, a few weeks later, one of the Exos would have been used for the RAID drive.

All five drives are currently a single Synology volume RAID 5 and, so far, only 15TB total have been written to them. I also have two 2TB nvme RAID 1 read/write cache (Btrfs pinned) and wonder how that would be affected. Would I need to remove it first, assuming the HD swap works?

Thanks

2

You can swap the disk as you mentioned. After powering on, go into Storage Manager to start rebuilding the storage pool.

You are strongly encouraged to make a full backup before starting the process.

3

Thanks Paul. Do I need to delete the cache first and create a new one after?

4

Deleting and recreating the cache is not required, but it’s good advice to be on the safe side.

5

Thanks. It occurred to me that it might be wise to pause backup tasks, too.

6

Before pulling the drive it is good practice to:

  1. Run a file scrub to correct any possible file corruption
  2. Ensure your daily off-NAS backup is current

Personally, I would leave things alone unless the IW drive is showing signs of failure.

7

I’ve decided to leave the drives as they are. Every 8-10-16 TB Seagate Expansion external usb drive I’ve purchased has had an EXOS but the 20TB just delivered contained a Barracuda and was purchased directly from Seagate. I expected to get another EXOS but it wasn’t my lucky day.

The NAS is the backup of my Plex server which is currently being moved from Windows 10 to a Mac M4 in a 5-bay drive enclosure.