RAID 5 Disk Failure Help

[Ipreferspam]

I built a server about 5 years ago with 4 WD 74 gb Raptors in a RAID 5 array on a Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 with 128 MB of Non ECC memory.

Today I received an email alert from the Promise Array Management that SMART failed on one of the raptors.

What should I do to replace this drive? I have not ever performed any maintenance on a RAID 5 array.

Is it as simple as pulling the drive from the backplane while the server is off, inserting a new drive, and turning it back on? Would the controller see a new disk and just rebuild the array?

Thank you in advance for your help.

If you need more information to help me with this problem, please let me know.

 

[bigi]

I'd unmout the drive from the unit first, if possible. It is always better to 'inform' the card that you'll get rid of drive first.
You may not need to turn off the box. If you can, set the rebuilt rate to max to spped up the whole process.
Then pray that other HDD does not crap out when you are replacing this one. Backup, backup, backup even when you have Raid 5.

 

[Blain]

The RAID 5 controller should be waiting for you to pull and replace the bad HD.
It should rebuild the array from there.