ReadyNAS 6 - Raid 5 Drive Replacement

I am running a ReadyNAS 104 currently with 4 x 1TB Hard Drives... 

I have these setup with Raid 5. it gives me the best perfomance & storage Raid option, whilst still maintaining 1 drive redundancy...

I have 2 questions.

If 1 drive fails, will the system to continue to work (obviously without redundancy at this point... Can I swap it out & replace the drive with a new blank one? I assume that, I can "hotswap" the drive & the NAS will resync the data to the new drive and re-establish the Raid Redundancy,

You are correct, the RAID array will still work on DEGRADED Status and since 1 drive had failed then no protection/redundancy is present. OS 6 Supports Hotswap so Yes, you can swap out the failed and replace it with a new one. NAS will then Resync and complete RAID 5 array again. Please see replacing a disk

I am running a ReadyNAS 104 currently with 4 x 1TB Hard Drives... 

I have these setup with Raid 5. it gives me the best perfomance & storage Raid option, whilst still maintaining 1 drive redundancy...

I have 2 questions.

If 1 drive fails, will the system to continue to work (obviously without redundancy at this point... Can I swap it out & replace the drive with a new blank one? I assume that, I can "hotswap" the drive & the NAS will resync the data to the new drive and re-establish the Raid Redundancy,


Next question, Currently I have 4x1TB, gives me 2.7TB of usable space on raid 5... which i totally get
What if I want to increase the capacity? If I swap a 1TB drive for a 3TB by swapping it out, i think I am right in saying I would get no ncrease in capacity...  Ideally once this has re-sync'ed i'd then replace the 2nd, 3rd and then the 4th one by one waiting for a resync between each drive replacement & I would tripple my storage space... 

1x3TB + 3*1TB = 3TB Usable Space + 996GB Protection + 2TB Unused Space
2*3TB + 2*1TB = 3TB Usable Space + 996GB Protection + 4TB Unused Space
3*3TB + 3*1TB = 3TB Usable Space + 996GB Protection + 6TB Unused Space
4*3TB = 9TB Usable Space + 3TB Protection

Would X-Raid would be more suited to wanting to increase storage space with incremental increases as each drive is upgraded?
in X-Raid how does it handle drive failure? I believe that the X-Raid system would result in only 2TB of usable space with 4*1TB drives?

Thanks

Henry

You are right again, you need to replace all drives in order to expand the volume. Please see ReadyNAS Volume Expansion and How do I expand existing X-RAID and What is X-RAID

Hope this helps!

Regards