My home system is an ReadyNAS 426. I have it set up for RAID-6 and X-RAID. It had 5 drives and one of them started going flaky so I purchased another. The flaky drive was still functioning when I inserted the new drive into the spare slot.
I was expecting the system to spin up the new drive and allow me to set it as a Global Spare, but it looks like it pulled it into the array.
Not a huge problem. However, I want to remove the flaky drive before it fails. If I pull out the flaky drive will the system re-balance around the newly missing drive and become a 5 disk X-RAID array again, or am I stuck running a 6 disk array from here on out?
If I pull out the flaky drive will the system re-balance around the newly missing drive and become a 5 disk X-RAID array again, or am I stuck running a 6 disk array from here on out?
You'll be running a degraded X-RAID volume if you pull out the flakey drive.
Are you familiar with ssh? It is possible to change the RAID setup from ssh if you are comfortable with the commands. @Sandshark has played around with those commands. There would be risk though, so it would be important to have an up-to-date backup of the files before using them.
This situation is one of the reasons it is best to not simply fill your NAS with drives when you don't have a need for that amount of space currently or in the near future. But, what's done is done in your case. I go over how to do a RAID reduction here: Reducing-RAID-size-removing-drives-WITHOUT-DATA-LOSS-is-possible . Each case is a bit different, so you'll need some Linux experience or a lot of Googling to insure you are doing it right for your specific case.
