2. Once all drives are replaced, "resize volume" to expand it.

3. Yes

4. Cache does not really matter much. SoftRAID does not care about the disks, so it would only be a possible performance difference.

5. they are OK. I have seen best performance recently with Seagates, like the Exos recently.

All questions will be around RAID 5

#1 If I build a RAID 5 with 4 drives, that is it I can not increase the number of drives. To increase the number of drives I have to start all over. Move all data to storage drives, add additional drives, recreate my RAID 5, load data back on to the RAID. Do I have this correct?

#2 Lets say I start with a ThunderBay 8 full of 6TB drives and in a couple years I need more storage I just slowly keep adding larger drives. Load a drive, rebuild raid, load a drive rebuild raid, repeat until all 8 drives have been uploaded. Is this correct? What do you do to SoftRAID to make it see the full size of all 8 new drives?

#3 With #2 being yes, is it wrong to say. If a 6TB drive dies toss in a new 14TB drive. Yes I can not use that 14TB drive until all have been changed to 14TB. But if I have to replace an old dead drive can I replace it with a larger one and by the time I have a majority replaced due to bad drives I could just update the rest of the drives to get more space?

#4 I understand that all drives need/should be of the same size, i.e. 6TB, but what about the Cache? Reason for question. Right now I have 3 WD Black 6TB 128MB Cache and 1 WD Black 6TB 256MB Cache and I am looking to go with the 8 bay unit so I would be getting 4 more WD Black 6TB 256MB Cache. Is that cool to mix Cache?

#5 Being a DAS unit and not a NAS, how are WD Black Drives on SoftRAID?

Thank you for your time

Daniel