Ok, so I have a RAID5 made out of 4 disks, with one of the drives failing. I do have a backup of pretty much 99% of the data (that last 1% is just data I can re-download) but I am worried about Murphy's Law rearing it's head and even my backup going bad somehow, so I would really rather rebuild the RAID just to be safe instead of use the backup.

So, I took the drives out one by one and ran SMART and read tests on them to try to see which one had failed, and it was 4th drive, I am RMA-ing it tomorrow morning. Thing is, while I was testing them, I got the first and second drives mixed up. Does it matter which order I plug the drives back into the RAID? If so, is there any way I can tell which order the drives were originally in?

Also, I realized I was using ports 5-8 on my card, instead of ports 1-4 (The card has two Mini-SAS ports, and I was using a Mini-SAS to 4 SATA port adapter), would it cause issues if I moved them to ports 1-4?

And finally.... do I have to issue some kind of special command or something to my RAID card to rebuild the RAID, or is it an automatic process?