SAS Hard Drive Duff in Dell Poweredge Server

[a_bradley]

Our server at school is a Dell Poweredge 2900 server with 4 Seagate SAS Cheetah T10 146GB drives set up in a RAID configuration, one of the drives has packed in and I was wondering do I need to replace it with the same spec drive or could I use a higher capacity drive such as a 300 GB Seagate ST3300656SS Cheetah?
Any help would be greatly appreciated
T.Bradley

[keithu]

You can use a higher capacity drive but of course you won't be able to use the extra capacity.

[Duke]

As long as it has the same connectivity, I'm fairly sure you could use a larger/faster drive, but you won't see any capacity gains until you had replaced all the drives in the array with larger models, grown the RAID array, then expanded the partition on it.

I've had companies occasionally send a 15k drive to replace a 10k drive, can't remember if they have ever been any capacity differences though. Dell wouldn't recommend you do anything other than go through them for the replacement, but if you call them and get through to someone helpful they may be able to advise - 0844 338 1200. I assume the server's not under warranty?

Cheers,
Chris

[Michael]

Yes you need to install a drive of equivalent or better specs for any type of RAID array.