My NetGear NAS is showing a degraded error. When I go to the admin page I can see the one drive in error state. I have 3 drives installed and setup for x-RAID. If I remove that one drive will I still maintain my data and can I swap in a new drive and it will automatically create the backup. I am assuming as well that I can "hot" swap into the one open slot.
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4- Bay (Diskless)
If I remove that one drive will I still maintain my data and can I swap in a new drive and it will automatically create the backup.
It's not doing that - RAID redundancy is not a backup. What it will do is recreate the contents of the failed disk from the remaining two.
RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe. It will make it more available during routine disk failures. But you need a real backup (on at least one other device) to keep the data safe.
I am assuming as well that I can "hot" swap into the one open slot.
Maybe, but don't do that. Just "hot swap" the failed disk - removing it and inserting the new one into the same slot with the NAS running. It should then detect the new insertion and start resyncing it. Performance will be slow during the process. Note that if one of the remaining disks fails during this process you will lose your data.
