Saw a sysadmin replace a dead hard drive without powering down the server and I called him reckless but that hot swap trick saved us 4 hours of downtime on a Friday.

My uncle Pete who ran IT for a school district told me hot swapping drives was asking for data corruption, but when we lost a drive mid-batch job last Tuesday, swapping it live kept everything running and the rebuild finished in 45 minutes without a single error, so has anyone else had that old school advice just not hold up under real pressure?

2 comments

2 Comments

morgan.rose5d ago

Did your uncle ever actually try it himself or was he just repeating what he heard at some conference in 1997? Because I had the exact same thing happen with a Dell server that was supposed to be “hot swap only for certified techs” and our IT guy just yanked the dead drive while the thing was chugging along. Zero issues, rebuild took less than an hour, and the server was back to normal like nothing happened. It’s like one of those rules that made sense when hardware was garbage but modern gear just handles it fine. I’ve done it twice now and it’s never bit me in the ass so far.

jana_jones5d ago

Yep, @morgan.rose same here, yanked a drive from a live HP server once and it rebuilt fine.