How to prepare a non-raid NAS hard disk for removal and swap with new drive (system thinks new drive is old one)

[MacFuddle]

Removal and swap perhaps not immediately clear so let me explain: In a 3-disk non-raid config of my modest 8 Gb RAM TS-351 (Intel® Celeron® 2,41 GHz J1800-dual-coreprocessor) I took out (not a hot-swap; machine was switched off) a functioning (non-system) hard drive to replace it with a bigger one (i.e. more Tb storage) but on reboot my QNAP NAS system did not seem aware that this was a new drive and it looked like the new drive had the name and bizarrely enough size limit of the old drive, can't remember what I had to do (lots of cussing that's for sure) to get it added as a new volume with its proper size but eventually I succeeded. I am curious what I could have done to make this disk swap run smoothly and have the new disk recognized as a ... new disk. Slightly different issue: Is it fair to say you can't just pop in any non-raid disk previously in use by the NAS expecting the NAS will immediately re-attach* this disk and use its proper settings (name, size etc.)?
* don't know the proper word

[dolbyman]

always swap the disks hot.(while the nas is on) this will make the transitions smooth

the disk contain the os and other partitions..older or foreign disks should not be randomly swapped in

[MacFuddle]

always swap the disks hot.(while the nas is on) this will make the transitions smooth

the disk contain the os and other partitions..older or foreign disks should not be randomly swapped in

Ok, thx for that, sounds a bit counterintuitive, I would have expected some "official" unmount procedure or something to that extent. Anyway, I'll have a go at it soon since the two auxiliary disks are close to full.