Hi. My name is Thomas Smaistrla. I'm with the Enterprise Expert Center. Currently I'm taking calls with technical support. Real quick I'll show you how to use the Dell OpenManage server adminstrator to manipulate your drive.
You can take a drive offline using the software. Currently we have all our drives online. We can use Dell OpenManage to take a drive offline and execute that.
And now the software is going to indicate that we have a failed drive. The hardware will show a blinking amber light to indicate that the drive has failed. We can go to our server.
And at this point you want to remove the drive. And you want to give it some time to spin down in case it is spinned up and there's platters in there, you don't want to do any damage to the drive.
After 10 or 15 seconds you can go ahead and remove the drive and replace it with the new drive. Just for demonstration purposes, I'll put the drive back in and we'll see in our software that the drive has been put back into the server.
The lights on the server will indicate that the drive is coming back online. This process, it takes approximately 30 seconds or so for the server to recognize the drive, at which time the bottom light will start to blink as an activity indicator, and the top light will come on green to show that the server has recognized the new drive.
Then using the OpenManage software you can come back and see that the drive is interacting nice, and it is in a rebuilding state. And then your virtual disk will show that it is still in a degraded state and it will stay that way until the rebuild is complete.
And that's pretty much it. You can see how easy it is to replace a SAS hard drive in our ninth gen servers. Come back in the future for additional tips.