"So, I'm now back to square one, where I have a RAID1 system with one predicted disk failure.  What would you do from here on in?" Another thing that many people don't know is that with a pf drive, it should be forced offline before replacing, otherwise the pf flag can be assigned to the new disk (until an actual 'rescan' is performed) and can result in some odd behavior (the controller is more sensitive to potential failure of pf drives). "Common sense says I cannot mix-match 10k/15k rpm drives!" You CAN mix/match speeds and/or sizes (there is nothing wrong with it 'technically'), but in real-world scenarios, you would never want to mix speeds (depending on the configuration, it would degrade the speed of the entire array).  One thing you CAN'T do is mix U320 and U160 SCSI drives on a backplane/controller. "What would you do from here on in?" I guess from here depends on what you feel most comfortable doing.  There is a chance that the pf drive will operate just fine until you are done with the server (or until you can get another replacement - if you feel another replacement would be better than the ones you currently have), although it could cause additional issues if its status degrades.  There is a chance that it could happen again if you try to replace it, but I believe it is unlikely to happen again.  If it were me (and it's important to remember that it's not :)), I would force offline disk 0 and replace it "hot" with the other 146GB drive.  Another thing you could do, which would probably feel less risky, is to simply insert the 146GB drive into an open slot, assign it as a hot-spare, then force offline disk 0, which will cause a rebuild to automatically start with disk 0.  
Hello to everyone. I hope someone can shed some light on this fairly unusual situation. I have a PowerEdge 2800 which is due to be replaced before May this year, it's a great server and done a great job over the last 7 years. Ok to the problem; Server Administrator was predicting a failure on 0:0 In the server we have:  0:0 Maxtor 36GB 15k 0:1 Fujitsu 73GB 15k 1:2 Something .. 1:3 Something .. So, I popped 0:0 and the server was working fine with a degraded array, and after 15 seconds I inserted it back in to the PE2800. After approximately 45 minutes the RAID 1 array was rebuilt, but it still said predicted failure. So I thought I best order some new drives - I received them today; 2 x 146GB 15k Seagate Cheetahs. Ok, so I popped 0:0 drive and inserted one of the 146GB cheetah's and the server crashed - would not boot at all, and was giving me an error saying the logical drive had failed. So, in the PERC4i BIOS, I forced drive 0:1 online, and the server is now back up and running albeit with a degraded array. So this is where I'm at, what choices do I have? Insert the old drive with a predicted failure, leave it alone, or try the 146GB cheetah again. I don't really fancy doing any of them, but I will order another 73GB Fujitsu in the meantime. What I want to know is why did the server crash after inserting the cheetah drive? I have swapped hot pluggable hard drives many-a-time in the past in many dell severs and never experienced anything like this. Currently running degraded, so any replies would be massively appreciated. Thanks a lot.
Degraded RAID 1 Array:PowerEdge 2800