Hi, I've been a pretty longtime happy StableBit DrivePool + Scanner user especially because of its easy & set n' forget little administration nature (+ flexibility).
Now is my first time when I get damaged sectors (5 in my case) on one of my 3x 3TB drives on my NAS. Not necessarily the most dangerous event and might not necessarily mean that much but I just want to take all possible precaution and replace the HDDs right away if any damaged sectors shows up as it could potentially be an early sign of mechanical wear n tear.
Now onto the questions:
1. What is the recommended way to proceed in replacing the HDD, I have a NAS with 4 HDD bays of which currently 3 are occupied. I don't do any duplication as I do offline backup to a 8TB USB Drive currently every once in a while using a 3rd party "sync" software. I have the balancing set to fill upp an entire disk to 90% before starting to fill up the 2nd etc instead of spreading out the files if that matters. There's currently 4.04 / 8.18 TB free on the drivepool.
2. Would it be possible to use StableBit DrivePool duplication as means of USB HDD backup that only gets fired up when it's time to do backup? What if I in the future plan to extend my storage and I need more than 8TB backed up to USB HDDs, is it possible to make a 2x USB HDD drivepool that only gets turned on when it's time to do backup? (The idea here would be to not have to worry how to split files between the two USB HDDs in a manual fashion and as a backup method I simply prefer to do offline USB HDD backup every once in a while)