Upgrading HD in NAS

[nick4c]

I have a F5-221 TNAS ... I built the NAS with 4 3TB drive (2-Seagate Barracuda + 2 Toshiba DT01ACA series) as I had them sitting around not being used (all new). Since it is not the Ideal HD for a NAS .. I have procured a couple of SeaWolf Pro NAS drives... 4 TB each ... am planning on swapping out the Desktop Drives for the NAS drives ...
Currently the 4 are in a RAID-5 array .. can I simply pull one at a time and let the Array rebuild itself for each drive .. ? then gradually I replace all the drive over time ... or is there a better method .. ? Can the Array have different size drives and utilize all available disk or will I have unused disk because of the size differences?

[nick4c]

Correct ... not SeaWolf Pro ... IronWolf Pro Nas Drives ...

[TMSupport]

Since RAID5 allows only one drive to be malfunctioned, you can pull out one HDD from the RAID5, insert the new one, and click " repair the RAID" to wait for the RAID rebuilding being finished. And repeat these process with the second new hard drive. Only one hard drive at one time.

[nick4c]

are there any recommendations on which drives I should change first ... starting from Slot 1 ... I go the first two Barracuda the next two Toshiba... on this site I see it mentioned that the Barracuda drive are problematic ... since at the moment I only have two IronWolf drives should I be swapping out those two first?

[TMSupport]

That should be ok to replace the two Barracuda drives first. Please make sure that the storage size of the new drive is no less than the Barracuda one.

[nick4c]

Since I am adding drives of a larger capacity ... do I need to follow any steps for the TNAS to see the additional disk space ... or will I need to replace all of the drives for that to occur? I had notice one post where someone needed to ssh into the device to use a LVG command to expand the storage... since the control panel did not display it ...

[TMSupport]

The usable space will be refreshed after RAID rebuilding is finished. The counting method of usable space for RAID5 is (n-1)*min, so if you have four HDDs with different size, the usable space will be 3*min.