Failing hard drive

[Illya]

Hello.
I have a Qnap nas with 8 hard drives in a raid 5 array. One of my hard drives has been detected as faulty and so I am hoping to swap it out.
I remember when I set this raid array up I read that I would need exactly the same drives or it wouldn’t work.
I have 8 x wdc wd40efrx-68n32n082.0 4Tbyte
Question: To swap out the drive, does the whole serial number need to be identical (including the -68n32n082.0 part)? Is there any latitude in the exactness of the drives?

Note: I set this up a few years back now and am not someone who visits this often. Only now that a drive needs replacing am I revisiting this. Therefore I’m pretty much a novice.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Mousetick]

You don't need to replace with the exact same drive. The bare minimum requirement is to replace with a disk of equal or greater capacity (4 TB in your case), if higher capacity the difference will be wasted. Can be different model or brand. It's highly recommended to use a model that is rated for NAS usage and is on QNAP's compatible list for your NAS model. Also recommended to use a drive with similar performance specs as the other ones in the array, as much as possible.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

i use to think that, but i mixed wd red, seagate ironwolf and hgst deskstar nas hdds together in a raid 5 before and never noticed any rebuild failure or drop outs. just make sure capacity size is the same. and do not get a SMR hdd or non raid hdd (aka desktop hdd). check the hdd compatibility list.

not many choices these days, i recommend the seagate ironwolf nas drives.