1) Yes, Hardware team can proactively fail a disk. 2) I dont think hotspare sync erases data from the failing disk. I believe customers can opt to keep the failed disk with them and not allowing EMC to take it? You can confirm it from your local team.  May be someone with good hardware knowledge can add more to it?  regards, Saurabh
Hi Guys,  I am working on both IBM DS and VMAX. I have idea about data erasure in vmax having permanent spare, when the disk fails data is automatically erased.   I was getting soft errors in IBM DS disk and we planned to replace the disk. I failed the disk and replaced it withing seconds. Now questions are:  1) Can we fail the disk in VMAX? 2) If yes --  EMC FE will replace the drive once we fail it so will it erase the data within seconds? 3) If no  --  EMC FE will just pull out the disk and in that case too I hope data will not be erased.  So what happens in this case with data? Please educate me on this.  Thanks, Shailender
Data erasure