Question About Disk Capacity Relative To Replacing An Existing Disk

I have a question about actual disk capacity in bytes relative to the TrueNAS disk replacement requirements.

My NAS currently has four Western Digital 6 TB Red Plus drives (model WD60EFZX) configured in RAIDZ2.

According to the TrueNAS documentation, when replacing a failed disk, the replacement drive must be of equal or greater capacity than the original drive.

When I looked for replacement options, I found that the current 6 TB Red Plus has a model number of WD60EFPX instead of WD60EFZX.

My question is:

If I replace a WD60EFZX with a WD60EFPX, could there be a problem that the new model’s exact byte capacity is slightly smaller (even by a few thousand bytes)?

In other words, when a manufacturer says a drive is 6 TB, is that always exactly 6 000 000 000 000 bytes, or does the true capacity vary slightly between models. If it does verify, could that small difference prevent its use as a replacement?

Thank you in advance for any information or thoughts on this question.

Use drive of the exact same size or larger. It it up to you to count every bit and byte.
It has happened in the past.

As @SmallBarky says - new drives are sometimes a slightly different size to older drives. (sometimes larger, sometimes smaller)

TN used to create a 2GB swap partition on each drive to take this into account - but IX for some reason took that away (and have been moaned at as a result). My non-scientific reasearch says that this is more likley to occur with SSD’s but thats not exclusive

1 Like

As of, I think, 24.10, TrueNAS no longer creates the swap partition, but creates a data partition of ($DISK_SIZE - 2 GB), for this exact reason. If a replacement disk is smaller than an original by less than 2 GB, that difference covers it. If the difference is greater than 2 GB, of course, you’re kind of screwed.

2 Likes

Thank you to everyone who replied to my original question — the responses were very helpful.

Based on the feedback, it looks like I should be able to use a newer 6 TB Red Plus WD60EFPX drive as long as its actual capacity is no more than 2 GB less than my existing WD60EFZX disks.

I may also extend my RAIDZ2 vdev by adding one or two additional 6 TB WD60EFPX drives. (I need to do some further research on extending a RAIDZ VDEV as there seems to be some caveats.)

I have one quick follow-up question:

When extending, the added drive must be of equal or greater capacity than the existing drives. It is reasonable to assume the same ($DISK_SIZE - 2 GB) tolerance is used to determine if the additional drive is equal or greater in capacity?