Had a HDD failure in my PC. Running RAID 1 (mirroring) & the primary HDD crapped out. Running a pair of 40 Gig HDD's. Had another 40 Gig HDD (different manufacturer) on hand & swapped out the bad one. Re-booted & tried to restore the array. Got a message that said the new HDD had insufficient space. Can I replace the source disk (the defective one) with, say, a 60 Gig HDD? Or do I have to swap the mirror disk (the good one) to the primary (source disk) spot? I don't think it's going to let me have a larger source disk than the mirror disk. Your opinions are most welcome!

rja1

You can use a larger drive, just not a smaller one. Of course you will only be using 40GB of the 60GB drive and the additional space will not be available.

Even though the replacement drive you have now is 40GB it is not uncommon that drives of the same stated capacity may vary slightly in actual capacity. I have 200GB drives from the same manufacturer that vary by a couple of GIGs.

There is a way to use the "smaller" 40GB drive, but it would be a little bit of work. You would have to install the drive as another physical drive (not part of the mirror). Then use a partitioning program to shrink the partion from the RAID array. Then mirror the RAID partition to the smaller 40 GB drive. Lastly, make the smaller 40GB the primary drive and create a mirror to the larger 40GB drive.

Michael J