Replacing RAID Disk

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Me again (sorry!)

 

First thing this morning was busy checking one of our servers and noticed that SMART is predicting the drive to fail in the array soon (wonderful).

 

So apart from busy trying to find a replacement HDD it's thrown up the issue of do I need a new caddy as well or since I'm simply going to be taking one drive out and putting another drive in it's place can I simply reuse the existing caddy and swap the drives over? Also I'm assuming I'm doing the right thing by planning to replace the drive when I can find a replacement or should I be trying something else first?

 

The server is a Dell Poweredge 2800.

 

Thanks

[SYNACK]

You should be able to reuse the caddy, I have done so dozens of times with hp gear, as long as you don't have one of the dell firmwares that only takes dell drives (unlikely) you should be fine replacing it. Best to try and get a drive as similar as possible in performance and features. I would also check your warrenty, HDs can often be 5 years so it may still be covered.

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Thanks SYNACK!

 

It's a Maxtor drive so I'll see if I can do a bit of digging to find out about any additional warranty details. Otherwise back to the hunt for a hard drive.

[teejay]

Probably worth having a chat with Dell support, SMART errors are quite often false and a few updates on the server firmware and hard drives 'may' get rid of it. You also need to be very careful to get a hard drive which at least matches the performance of the hard drive and is also at least as big as the current one. Also be careful using a different brand or model to the one that's in there as not all brands/models supposedly of the same size actually turn out to be the same size! If its one sector smaller than the existing drives, then it won't work.

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Thanks again all, called Dell up today and spent a bit of time chatting to them and they ended up advising getting a replacement drive and I have managed to source one just before I left today so will get the order sorted out earlier tomorrow.

 

Thanks again!