Can I switch drives while running I/O Express? 

You can switch drives without turning caching off only if the drive you are replacing it with is the same size or smaller.

If the new drive you are installing is larger than the old one you must shut down caching on every node that was caching this disk, install the new drive, and restart caching.

When I/O Express starts to cache a block that is larger than the largest block from the original drive, it will send an interrupt to the processor to stop. This will cause a system crash. This happens because when I/O Express starts up, it locates each disk and extracts a description of each. If you later change the disk name, I/O Express will search for and fail to find the disk under its original name. If you replace one disk with another, especially if the disks are of different sizes, I/O Express will think there is a serious problem with your disks and will shut down the system to prevent data loss.

The solution to this is to shut down caching before changing disk names or the disks themselves.

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