Are there any tricks for installing a hot swap drive in a Poweredge 2900

dell-poweredgehard drivehotswap

I just bought a bought a couple of new drives from Dell for a Poweredge 2900 server. I installed them in the hot swap caddy and am attempting to install.

My understanding is I can just remove the blanks from the front of the machine and plug in the drives.

The problem is that as hard as I push, the connectors at the rear just don't seem to connect. Is it normal that I should need to use so much force? Is it likely that dust lodged in the rear connectors is blocking the connection?

Any suggestions welcome!

Best Answer

Using those drives there is a 'lever' on the front of them that should be in the 'open' position when inserting the drives, when it gets back far enough, you can start to close the lever and it actually locks them in place. These drives if configured correctly and in certain types of raids can be removed while the machine is powered on and rebuild themselves... depending on the configuration.