4 Servicing Storage Drives
This section describes how to service storage drives.
Storage drives are replaceable components that do not require you to power off the server before servicing. For more information about replaceable components, see Illustrated Parts Breakdown and Replaceable Components.
Note:
The procedures and illustrations in this chapter apply to both NVMe and SAS storage drives, except where noted.The following sections describe how to remove and replace hard-disk drives (HDDs) and NVMe solid-state drives (SSD) storage drives.
Storage Drive Hot-Plug Conditions
The SAS hard-disk drives (HDDs) or NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) that are installed in the server are in most cases hot-pluggable. The hot-plug capability depends on how the drives are configured and whether the drive is an NVMe device. To hot-plug a drive you must take the drive offline before you can remove it. When you take the drive offline, you prevent any application from accessing the drive and remove the logical software links to the drive. For an NVMe storage drive, you must not only take the drive offline, but also power down the drive slot.
The following conditions inhibit the ability to perform hot-plugging of a drive:
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The drive provides the operating system, and the operating system is not mirrored on another drive.
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The drive cannot be logically isolated from the online operations of the server.
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The operating system does not support hot plug for the drive.
If any of these disk drive conditions are true, then you must shut down the system before you replace the drive. See Powering Down the Server.
Note:
Replacing a drive does not require extending or removing the server from a rack.Storage Drive Failure and RAID
A single storage drive failure does not cause a data failure if you configured the storage drives as a mirrored RAID 1 volume (optional). The storage drive can be removed, and when a new storage drive is inserted, the contents are automatically rebuilt from the rest of the array with no need to reconfigure the RAID parameters. If you configured the replaced storage drive as a hot-spare, the new HDD is automatically configured as a new hot-spare.
See Configure NVMe RAID Using BRU for server instructions.
Removing and Replacing Storage Drives Using an OS
The following sections describe how to remove and replace an HDD or SSD storage drive using supported Operating Systems.
Removing and Replacing an NVMe Storage Drive Using Oracle Linux
The following sections describe how to remove and replace an NVMe storage drive on a server that is running the Oracle Linux operating system.
Remove an NVMe Storage Drive
Perform this procedure to physically remove an NVMe storage drive from the server.