Dell uses - and will send you - a "certified" drive as a replacement.  "Certified" ensures that the drives, regardless of make/model, will operate well with other certified drives and with Dell controllers. NEVER shut down a server to replace a hot-swappable drive ... if it is hot-swap, swap it hot.  If the replacement does not start rebuilding automatically, then you can assign it as a hot-spare.  This can be done in the OS using the OpenManage software.
Hi, We have one disk failure in a RAID 5 system in PowerEdge 2950 with Perc 6i RAID card. Original HDD is WD SATA 7200 rpm 1 TB. Since Dell doesn't sell the original model of HDD anymore, the Dell sales rep sold us a compatible HDD, probably not from WD. Although she said it will rebuild the RAID, I still want to double check here. Can we use this compatible HDD to rebuild the RAID without data loss? Does Dell make sure the replacement HDD has same number of cylinders, sectors, etc? Or does it not matter? Do we just shut down the server, swap out the faulty HDD, power on, and configure BIOS to rebuild the RAID5? Thank you very much for reviewing my question! -Andrew
2950 RAID5 HDD replacement