Failing (not failed) Drive Replacement on Ultra6 (RAID6)

upstate22 wrote:
Running: Ultra6 with X-RAID2, 6 disks (RAIDiator 4.2.20) One of the drives is starting to report reallocation errors and I want to replace before it goes bad/offline. What's the procedure for doing this? I see a bunch of posts/docs for failed drives but this drive is still up/fine (for now) Do I simply yank the drive out hot and push new drive in? Will it swap over to spare then back? TIA!

The first step is to update your backup, as sometimes a second disk will fail when the RAID array is being rebuilt. If that were to happen, you would lose your data.

Remove the old drive with the unit running, put the new drive into the tray, and reinsert it. The NAS should detect the disk removal and insertion, and will rebuild the raid array as a background task. You will still be able to access your data (with some loss in speed).

The replacement drive needs to be at least as large as the existing disk. It can take up to 24 hours for everything to get rebuilt.

Understood on the backup but with RAID6, I thought I could lose 2 disks and be OK? I have RAID Level X-RAID2, 6 disks (with dual redundancy)

If you are using dual redundancy, then you are correct. The volume would still be protected against one additional drive failure while you are building the array.