Proliant DL380G5 - Hotplug HDD replacement

[Piazza Maurice]

Hi all, I have a Proliant DL380G5 with P400/RAID5 system volume (3 SAS 72Gb HDD) and one HDD is flashing orange.
I got a new identical HDD from HP support.

Normally the HDD are Hotplug.
Can I just take out defective HDD and replace with new one or is there something to do manually before, to rebuild RAID 5 volume ?

Thank you in advance for your support.

Maurice

[Johan Guldmyr · Accepted solution]

Hello!

Well, before just doing that I think it's a good idea to check ACU first on the server. See what it says about the disk.

But for the smart arrays yes: take out the broken one and put in the new one. Rebuild will start automagically.

[Michael A. McKenney]

I would add a spare drive and let it fail over then replace the bad drive. If your OS is on RAID 5, backup before rebooting. Microsoft wants OS and paging on RAID 1 or 10. RAID 5 failure can corrupt a Windows OS. So get a full backup including Active Directory services.

[Johan Guldmyr]

But if they want to be proactive instead of waiting for it to fail, I guess best would be to then first assign it as a spare and replace it right away?

Blinking orange is proactive failure isn't it?

[Michael A. McKenney]

It could be a pre-emptive failure notice or a firmware glitch. I had a DL360G3 that had a firmware glitch and reported a bad drive. HP usually has you do firmware first to see if it corrects the issue.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Ah ok cool.

From what I remember once a drive was marked as bad by a 'bad' firmware - the disk wouldn't go back to good. But maybe in some cases they do.

[Piazza Maurice]

Hi all,

thank you for your support.

I changed this disk without stopping the server and the disk content was reconstructed quickly and all is ok.

All disks with green led and all volumes ok !

Best regards.

Maurice

[Piazza Maurice]

Hot plug hard disk changed without problems !