Hello people.
I’ve just had a drive go dead in my Promise R8 and noticed that my cold spare is 5400rpm instead of the others at 7200rpm.
It’s very hard finding a 3tb 7200 drive at the moment so my question is can I put in a 4tb 7200 instead? I seem to recall that you can and the drive will just be striped as a 3TB drive. Is this correct?
I can’t speak for the Promise specifically, but that’s how every other RAID system should work. As long as the drive has at least as many sectors as the other drives in the array, it shouldn’t care.
i’ve never tried it (i have two R6’s)…but i have found Promise to have decent customer support…fwiw.
You can! In fact this is how you increase capacity. Place larger drives in, one at a time, rebuilding between each one, until you’ve replaced them all, at which point the capacity bumps to whatever the combination of drive size and raid level your new drives support.
But until that last drive goes in, your array will behave like it is made up of the smallest drive it contains.
I have done this with an older Promise R4 and it works. It may not be the most efficient way to run your array, but it’s definitely better than throwing a 5400rpm drive in there.