No place to connect new drive

[AVB]

I've got a 5 drive ZFS raid and have one drive going bad (ada03). Looking at the procedure I need to have the new drive ready and waiting once I detach the old one. However, I don't have any a sata port to do that with. 5 drives, 5 satas no more no less. Would cloning the failing drive and just replacing it in the array work? Has this been done? If so, should any particular cloning program be used or doesn't it matter?

I've got just over 7TB of data on this and would prefer not spending 20 hours reloading everything from my backup if I can avoid it.

Thanks to the gurus who help us lost ones out.

 

[praecorloth]

I ran in to this situation recently. All I had to do was unplug the failing drive, plug in the new drive, and fire up the machine. Once the machine was up, I went in to Storage, and the View Disks section of the affected array. Click replace on the disk that was failing, select the new disk, and away it went populating the new disk with the necessary data.

 

[ProtoSD]

I recommend taking the failing disk offline either in the GUI or command line before removing. I've seen a few people have trouble that didn't do this.

 

[AVB]

Hard to believe it is that easy, I guess I'll find out once the new drive arrives. Thank you for your help.

 

[AVB]

It was that easy. Well into a 16hr resliver and everything is looking good.