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 safest way is to make a backup and restore it to the new array.
Your way sounds pretty fun though. I’m sure the firmware will complain, but once you have a solid backup you can go nuts!
Also consider a solution such as Bachefs - RAID is cool and all, but this will get you most of the way there too. (Decide on the data safety for yourself but I’m running a 90tb pool with 24tb of metadata / cache on SSD)