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dell proedge 1950 hard drive rotating green/amber light

Dell ProEdge 1950
(4) 146GB 10k drives
RAID 5 with hot spare
Hyper-V 2012, with one guest OS running server 2012

I have a Dell proedge server with a raid 5 (4) drives including a hot spare. The hot spare is blinking amber and green at equal internals on the leds. These are used drives, and a new raid set. I looked up the lights online and it says it could be indicating failure of the drive. If I go into bios, the smart data says the drive has no problems, and while in bios the drive is solid green on the led. In fact, it stays green until the guest OS completely boots, then it switches to the green/amber.

Is the drive going bad or does this mean something else?

Scott C

I wouldn't trust it. Not an expensive thing to replace to keep your data safe.

SOLUTION

Wayne88

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Seth Simmons

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icecom4

ASKER

Thank you. Curious then, what is the recommended way to replace a hot spare? Do I have to power down, boot in bios, then remove as a hot spare in the raid set? Or can I just replace it while on the fly?

Wayne88

If the hot spare is not active and going bad while in stand-by mode then it won't make a difference. If it's active, as a general rule you don't power down the server when hot-swapping. You risk higher chance of data corruption this way.

For RAID cards that support hot swapping, you hot swap when the machine is powered on. Hope that helps.

Wayne