Some drive failures require drive replacement, others only require performing a recovery process. Use the recovery process to ensure that all partitions are recovered before proceeding with any further drive recovery or replacement procedures. Unless you are certain the drive has failed, perform a drive recovery.
Drives can fail for a number of reasons, including corrupt sectors or erroneous blocks of data. Typically, the RAID controller handles these types of errors and they do not cause the server to fail.
More serious errors may cause a drive failure, causing one or both drives to fall out of the RAID. Should one partition of a drive fail, attempt a disk recovery. If a partition fails repeatedly, replace the drive. If all the partitions fall out of RAID, replace the failed drive.
- Failed drives are hot-swappable, so a failed drive can be replaced without shutting down the server. However, there are serious risks in trying to swap a drive that has not failed.
- Do not assume that because the red LED is illuminated that a drive is faulty. Under a RAID rebuild/recovery, the red LED is illuminated. If the drive fails and must be replaced, remove it from the server.
- If the drive shows signs of failure (through warning events in the event log), the drive can be replaced as it is hot-swappable.
- Do not pull out a drive that is in a known good configuration. Doing so can potentially lead to data corruption.
- Unless you are certain the drive has failed, perform a disk recovery.
- Drive redundancy is unsupported if the drive is removed from the server.
- The new drive does not require the same capacity as the drive being replaced.