I've ordered a new hard drive to replace a bad one in a Dell Power Edge R515.
The manual covers obvious topics regarding physical replacing of hard drives, but I've never done this before on a production server where RAID is involved.
I've heard people talk about this topic, and I've heard that some servers have RAID controllers that are smart enough to allow you to just put in the new drive (hot swap), and then the server will know automatically how to rebuild that drive to be what the old one was to the system.
Where do I find the proper procedure for replacing a failed hard drive on a live production Dell Power Edge R515?
Can someone with experience tell me how easy or hard this usually is?
Best Answer
You pull out the bad drive and, put a new, working drive in its place. It's as easy as it sounds... just so long as you don't destroy your array by pulling out the wrong drive.
If you want, you can proceed to check the disk controller utility (or whatever else you'd use, like iDRAC) to verify that the array is rebuilding onto the replacement drive, which should happen automatically.
Not sure what you're wanting in the way of a "procedure" for this process.