How to replace failing Disk 1?

amn0270 wrote:
Since its Disk 1 that is going bad, will I be able to hot pull Disk 1 out and just put the new drive in

Yes.

amn0270 wrote:
My thinking is that the Disk 1 bay is where the boot drive has to reside and Disk 2 is the mirror so I thought Disk 1 had to contain the boot files and setting in order to boot the Readynas which is why I thought I had to move Disk 2 into the Disk 1 bay and put the new empty hard drive into the the Disk 2 bay, boot it up and then the unit will sync with the now blank Disk 2. Am I wrong?

The OS partition is mirrored across the disks, just like the data volume is. So with disk 1 going bad simply remove that disk, wait a little bit and insert the replacement disk (the time taken to remove the dead disk from the tray and insert replacement into it should be more than long enough to wait before adding the replacement disk into the NAS).