Hello - have a Poweredge T320 with a H710. We currently have 4 virtual RAID1 disks (8 physical disks) - the OS pair, two data pairs, and a new 3TB data pair we migrated data from the two older data pair drives to. So, we'd like to decommission the two middle virtual drives and remove those four physical hard drives for archive or later spare use down the road once the data on them becomes too stale to be useful.

I'd like to do this in the "recommended" fashion that leaves the data available on the drives. I presume that simply deleting the virtual disks in Dell Server Administrator will remove the config from the RAID card and let the drives show as either foreign or unconfigured. Ideally, I would like to keep them from having the config on the drive overwritten in case the new 3TB mirror fails in the next few weeks, I have a quick restore option to bring these online. Just in case. Paranoid, yes, but I never destroy data I don't have to...

So, the question is, will deleting the virtual disk in Server Administrator wipe the config on the drives or just put them in a foreign/unconfigured state where I can then remove them while the server is online. Just want to not do this the wrong way and create an unforseen issue. I think this should work right, but asking costs nothing so I figured asking won't hurt a bit...