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Reusing Raid 5 Disks

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user125

IS-IT--Management
Oct 8, 2003
49
US
We have two servers (ML530 G2 and DL380G2) w/ identical HP 10K RPM SCSI drives w/ a raid 5. One is decommissioned and the other will be decommissioned shortly.
However, one of the drives on the production server had a drive failure.
My hope was to take one of the drives from the decommissioned server and pop it into the production server.
Both are running RAID 5.

I broke the array on the decomm. server. To my knowledge, that should have wiped out all the volume and partition information. However, I do not know if it is safe to then take a drive from the decomm'ed server and replace the failed drive.

Will the existing array see it as a replacement drive, wipe it and rebuild? Or will it fail because it was used in an array before.

Are there any remnant data that resides on the drives after deleting a raid 5 array?

These servers are 10-15 years old, so we're just trying to keep them alive until we decommission it. I'm not looking to pay a premium to find a vendor that still sells replacement drives for this system.
 
As soon as you put the replacement drive into the server where the original drive failed, it will get the array configuration information from the array controller and begin rebuilding your RAID5 array.

To break the array on the decommissioned server first was not necessary but it didn't hurt anything either.
 
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