Replacing hard dive in RAID 1 with PERC H310 in T3600

I want to share my experience replacing a Hard Drive in my Workstation. I have a T3600 with a Dell PERC H310 RAID controller and 2 X 2TB drives in RAID 1 configuration. I am not an expert so I had questions along the way, and the available information was not always helpful.

Problem: Critical Error Message saying that my Virtual Drive was degraded. Going into the PERC Configuration Utility ( + during boot) showed that the second physical disk was "missing". This is usually a hard drive or a controller problem. I switched the connections of the Hard drives and it followed the hard drive, so the controller board was OK.

Issue 1: The hard drive was obsolete, so I could not buy the same hard drive to pair with the existing one. I did not want to risk it, so I bought a similar hard drive from the same manufacturer.

Issue 2: When I installed the Hard Drive in the same slot as the old one, it did not rebuild automatically. The Virtual Drive in the Configuration Utility was still showing as that it was missing a disk drive. As I explored the other tabs, it turned out that the hard drive was setup as Non-RAID. So, the first thing was to set it up as RAID. When you do that, the disk shows up in the VD Mgmt tab as not configured. It was not until I set it up as Global HS (global Hot Swap) that the adapter identified the Hard Disk, put t in the right Disk Group and started the rebuild process.

I hope this post is useful