You can clone the drives with dd - I've done it a lot and it's the preferred solution. Instead of dd use gnu ddrescue (not dd_rescue) as it's just as fast, gives progress and, should errors occur, it will both retry them and bisect error areas.
If you *do* get errors then you need to know what blocks are not copied and you can tell md to resync just those blocks.
Do I need to do anything special after cloning one drive to a new drive to get it recognized as being part of the array?
Why are you replacing them? Do you have SMART errors or have you been having problems? I ask as you *may* find that newer disks are less reliable than older ones - I get the impression that consumer grade disks run closer to tolerance nowadays as the margins get thinner. No, I have no reference to stats
They are all throwing a SMART error. The error thrown appears to be claiming that a SMART log write was aborted. I have RMAed the drives and will have the replacements at my door this afternoon. The error being thrown by all of the disks is below.
Error 3 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 10238 hours (426 days + 14 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.
After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
- -- -- -- -- -- -
04 51 01 00 00 00 a0 Error: ABRT
Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -------------- --------------------
b0 d6 01 e0 4f c2 a0 02 00:03:21.785 SMART WRITE LOG
80 45 01 01 44 57 a0 02 00:03:21.761 [VENDOR SPECIFIC]
ec ff 01 01 00 00 a0 02 00:03:20.742 IDENTIFY DEVICE
Having said that I'd think about getting larger disks and find a way to use raid6.
When a drive fails in a raid5 and you remove it and add a spare. When that happens you then rely on a full read of every bit on the remaining 4 disks - if even 1 block fails you are SOL and relying on fsck
The drives are about as big as I want them to get. Any bigger and data loss starts to hurt more on failure. Both for loss of data and recovery time. I have 5 2TB drives that I want to get duplicated out. I have rebuilt one and would like to clone the rest so as to tax the existing drives less and finish sooner.
I do have a sixth drive available and would like to expand the array to RAID 6 after the swap has finished.
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