Removing a Drive

If you have a hot-swap carrier and want to physically remove a drive from your system without powering it down, you must first remove it through the 3ware software. This is required for 3ware controllers before the 9550SX model, and recommended for the 9550SX and 9590SE models.

This is useful if you know that a drive is developing a problem and you want to replace it, or to replace a drive which has already failed.

Warnings:
Physically removing a drive that is not in a hot swap carrier can result in a system hang or may even damage the system and the drive.

The steps below will destroy any information that identifies this drive as part of a RAID unit. Existing data on this drive will no longer be available.

Notes:
If you want to remove a unit from your system and reassemble it in another system, do not follow these steps. Instead, turn to Removing a Unit.

If you unplug a drive on a 9500S controller without first removing it through 3DM or 3BM, the controller will not recognize it as gone. Always use the Remove Drive command to remove a drive before unplugging it.

If you unplug a drive on a 9550SX or 9590SE controller without first removing it in 3DM, it will be listed as removed, however it will not be completely removed unless you Rescan the controller.

To remove a drive

In 3DM, choose Management > Maintenance.

On the Maintenance Page, remove Drive links appear next to all drives that can be removed from units, and next to drives in the Available Drives list.

Locate the drive you want to remove and click the Remove Drive link .

(You can remove a drive that is part of a redundant unit, or that is shown in the list of Available Drives.)

When 3DM asks you to confirm that you want to remove the drive, click OK.

You can now remove the drive from your system.

If you removed a drive that was part of a unit, the unit may become degraded.