Our company has a Dell PowerEdge 1800 Server. There are 4 identical 120GB hard drives installed and configured in a RAID-10 array to provide 240GB worth of storage. I have three questions about what to do when a drive fails. 1) This server has hot-swappable SCSI drives (I believe) so physically, all I need to do is remove the failed drive and replace it with a new one. How do I know which drive has failed by looking at them? 2) Do I need to replace the drive with the exact same type or can I use one with a higher capacity (even though the additional capacity won't be utilized)? 3) Once I've put in the new drive, I would use Dell's OpenManage software to rebuild the array, correct? Is there any pros/cons to using this software over rebooting the server and rebuilding the array from with-in the RAID BIOS? -Ryan Adams Free Computer Tips and more:http://RyanTAdams.com Paid Tech Support: Black Diamond

"hot-swappable SCSI drives (I believe) " This is the first thing. You need to KNOW for sure. This would lead you to know what the array is running on too and how to fix it. Some systems have to shut down hotswap or not to rebuild the array. Normally all arrays have some application to tell the admin what is going on in the OS but may be in the array bios too. Openmanage is really a whole collection of tools and versions. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Just checked and it is hot swappable. What about my questions? -Ryan Adams Free Computer Tips and more:http://RyanTAdams.com Paid Tech Support: Black Diamond

1) Most of the servers I've worked on have lights on the hotswappable drive bays. When a drive has become defunct, the orange light comes on. When the drive(s) are good, the light is green. I would hope dell would be smart enough to do the same, but then, you never know so call dell server support and ask them. They'll be able to tell you definitively....or, they should be able to anyhow. 2) You can use a higher capacity. At least, that's true for the RAID Controllers I've worked with. I would double check the specs on the controller your dell uses so as to avoid any mistakes and thus create yourself an even bigger headache in the event of a drive failure. 3) Can't answer this for you as I've never been forced to work on a dell server. However, with every other server I've worked with (custom builds mostly but a good mix of IBM and Compaqs as well) I've used the software. The point of the software being, you don't have to reboot. Rebooting of course is downtime (ie: the server is inaccessible during the boot process) which defeats the purpose of hotswappable drives. I've worked on several hundred servers over the last 15 years (well ok, the 11 years previous to the last 4 in which I've been employed solely as a network technician and I no longer support servers except the one I built for our network monitoring tools) and I've never seen a server with hotswappable drives that required a reboot.

I am just saying you need to read the owners manual for both the hardware and software. There isn't enough info for me at least to tell. If your windows software supports rebuilding then you don't need to reboot. If your only way to rebuild array is to use the adapter or enclosure bios firmware then you will need to reboot and I know no way around that. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10