Change number of disks in raid 5 from 5 to 4?

[pkarza]

Recently, I upgraded my F5 421 to TOS 6. Everything seems to be working well… but…

The hard drives never spin down. The lights are always cycling through the hard drives from 1 - 5… over and over. I have contacted Terramaster and I have been told they are ‘syncing’ or doing a write. How many days will this do this? I can’t even put this to sleep or schedule any kind of a schedule.

I am doing nothing on the NAS and don’t really have a lot on it - I use it for storage of personal things - like photos and a Plex library.

I have 5 x 2TB hard drives in a TRAID. I wonder if I could ‘shrink’ this to FOUR and create a hot spare? Maybe if I do this, the Raid will repair or sync… and I will have peace of mind that I won’t lose anything.

Thanks. I look forward to the feedback and help.

[GevinKe]

Hi, we do not recommend this approach, as reducing the number of hard drives will trigger missing warnings in the array system. While this will not immediately affect usage, there is indeed a risk of data loss. If another hard drive fails in the future, data may be permanently lost and irretrievable.

Therefore, if you absolutely need to reduce the number of hard drives in the array, please ensure that you back up your data first and consider reconfiguring the array to ensure data safety.

Thank you for your support of TerraMaster!