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I have a home server I built several years ago. It used to be a mail server, but now it's mainly just a home file server. Still, it runs a three-drive RAID 5 array for safety. Recently, one of the drives failed and I decided it was time to replace the whole array (as it was old spinning disk drives and those are so early-2010s).

You'd think this would be easy, and it would be, if documentation for it were any good. The best I could find skipped over some rather important details, which I had to figure out from extensive Duck Duck Going and the friendly folks in the #ubuntu channel on irc.libera.chat. Much of this is derived from this tutorial, but with a lot more detail here.

So that I don't have to re-research all of this next time, and hopefully to help someone else in a similar situation, I'm going to document the whole process here in detail, with descriptions. This isn't quite a blow-by-blow, since I am not going to include all of my missteps along the way, but it's close.

Buckle up.