RAID 5 Hot Swappable Question

Yes you can replace the 146 with the 36 Gig

 

To be on the safe side, manually run patrol reads, let this finish. Run a consistency check let it finish. Between the two you are verify your array does not have any bad blocks/parity errors, which could cause a disk to fail while the array is rebuilding from the disk swap; without this, a second disk could fail, during the rebuild, it is rare but no sense in taking chances. Patrol reads check the entire disk set surface, the most dangerous being areas which do not have data, thus never checked by the raid adapter. During a rebuild these areas are accessed, this is where a second disk can go belly up.

 

After the above I would pull the 146 out, let the adapter recognize the drive is out, it will sound a nasty alarm, shut down the machine, place the 36 Gig in, restart. A rebuild will take place, with some speed degradation until the array is rebuilt, you can use the machine while this is happening, you can also shut the alarm off in the bios setup or from the Dell Open Manage software. You do not have to follow the procedure , as you could just pull the 146 and replace it with the 36 G, will the machine is on but I prefer to have the adapter recognize one drive is removed before I place another back in.