It is my understanding that you can mix drives as long and they are all the same type ZCS or BCS drives. I currently have a mix of 36GB and 72GB drives in a volume. when you add a larger drive to the raid set that drive becomes the parity and moves the smaller (old) parity drive to a data drive.
Steven
Yes, but the original question was not to add new drives, but to deliberately fail an existing 18G drive and reconstruct on a 36G spare, thereby replacing the 18 with the 36. This can be done, but unless things have changed, the filer will only use 18G of the 36G spare, and 18G will be left permanently unavailable. At least that is the way it used to work.
You are correct that this is not a problem when you *add* a larger drive to a volume. But I think that the original question was about failing and reconstructing.
I am afraid that you cannot migrate from a volume of 18G drives to a volume of 36G drives "in place". You must create a new volume of 36G drives and copy. Then switch over to the new volume, delete the old volume, and remove the old 18G disks.
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support