TerraMaster Forum

I recently have moved from having Plex Media Server running on a F4-220 to a F5-221. I simply moved the 4 hard drives from the F4 to the F5 and everything is running great.

I am now considering taking advantage of the one empty drive slot in the F5-221 by using it for a "Hot Spare" drive. My question is after inserting the 5th drive into the F5 and telling TOS to use it as a hot spare will I still be able to use Plex while the new drive is being configured?? If not any rough idea about how long Plex will be unavailable ??

Thanks for any help and insights . . .

When the RAID you created has a hard drive failure, a hot spare will be added to the degraded array. Hot spare disk will not affect the normal use.

Thank you . . .

Following up on my previous question about a "hot spare" drive. Is it necessary to power down the F5-221 before adding the 5th drive (which will be the hot spare) or can the drive be added while the F5-221 is running??

Thank you . . .

I'm having a problem trying to set up a hot spare drive in my F5-221 NAS.

Here is the situation: the F5-221 currently a four 5TB drives in a Raid 5 configuration. It is running Plex Media Server as the only application and is performing very well. When ever I try to add a fifth drive to the NAS I get the error message that the Raid volume has encountered an "exception". I have tried with two differnt 6TB drives with the same result. When I get this message I remove the fifth drive, reboot the NAS and everything is back to normal with the Raid volume reported as "Good".

Based on Terra-Master supports previous messages I have NOT powered down the NAS when inserting the fifth drive. Should I?? Does the fifth drive need to have the EXACT same storage capacity as the installed drives or can it be larger??

Is there anything that I can do different to enable the fifth drive without causing the installed Raid 5 to fail??

Which system version did you install? Do it still get an exception if you plug in the fifth drive while it's powered off? Does your device detect the fifth drive?

1. The F5-221 is running TOS 4.2.39.
2. I have not tried plugging in the 5th drive with the unit powered off. Should I??
3. After plugging in the 5th drive (with the NAS powered on) and getting the Raid exception error, when I go to "Control Panel" -> "Hard Drive" only two of the installed Raid drives are dected. Once I remove the fifth drive and restart the NAS all four drives are correctly detected.

Please note: I did not attempt to add the fifth drive while the NAS was powered off since TMzethar said it was not necessary.

Any help with this problem is greatly appreciated. Thank you . . .

Anyone from Terra-Master support have any insight into this problem??