Drive Replacement

In some cases this won't be a problem assuming that you have sufficient other devices present with the data and protection stripes necessary to protect the data. If you pull a smartfailed drive out while FlexProtect is running and replace with a new drive, FlexProtect may be able to continue reprotecting the data that was on the pulled drive. So long as FlexProtect finishes successfully (status Success in isi job status or in the job reports) then things may end up OK.

The problem that sometimes arises is what happens when the cluster loses more devices than the protection level allows.  In those sorts of cases, FlexProtect will not have all the data/protection stripes needed to reprotect the data on the pulled drive and the job will fail. That's when it may be necessary to locate the original drive, put it back into the bay, run a command to re-add it to the cluster (so that the cluster knows it's there and it's available for reads for the smartfail process), and then restart FlexProtect. I'm making a big assumption above that the drive still can be re-added as a smartfailed device. If the drive had a hardware failure then it won't be able to be re-added.

ALWAYS engage support when this happens. Support has an entire team who's dedicated to handling these sorts of issues and can give the best advice and guidance to try to recover.

There are, of course, other variables that come into play here but the scenario above I have dealt with many times over the years, and I've dealt (or seen) much worse situations.