Thanks for all the info guys. I ran some tests on the latest 3.12.8 kernel. I set up 3 1GB files and attached them to /dev/loop{1..3} and created a BTRFS RAID 5 volume with them.
I copied some data (from dev/urandom) into two test files and got their MD5 sums and saved them to a text file. I then unmounted the volume, trashed Disk3 and created a new Disk4 file, attached to /dev/loop4. I mounted the BTRFS RAID 5 volume degraded and the md5 sums were fine. I added /dev/loop4 to the volume and then deleted the missing device and it rebalanced. I had data spread out on all three devices now. MD5 sums unchanged on test files. This, to me, implies BTRFS RAID 5 is working quite well and I can in fact, replace a dead drive. Am I missing something?-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html