I had an issue yesterday with a failed hard drive in a remote office. There is no IT staff at that location and the office has about 15 people total. The server was a Dell and has the Gold support package. When I called in the issue, I only got transferred twice and got to a technician. He confirmed the failed drive with me and dispatched a tech to go on site to replace the drive. The tech arrived the next day and called me before he started (as directed) and successfully replaced the drive. The original tech followed up with an email and contact information for any further issues. When the drive was replaced, the Dell server manager indicated that the drive was still in the "ready" state. There were options to "Assign Global Hot Spare" or "Clear". Since we had no hot spare in the original array, I was concerned that the controller might somehow shrink the original array to accommodate the hot spare. So, I emailed the Dell tech. The tech was out for a few days, so I emailed his backup. I almost immediately got a call from the tech explaining that on that particular array controller, any new drives do not automatically re-build but rather go to a "ready" state, then you have to initialize as a hot spare, then the array "uses" the hot spare to replace the failed drive. Now we are rebuilding and recovered back to the original RAID configuration.
What a difference between the Dell Gold support and the home user support! I guess you get what you pay for in the computer world!
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