Do we really have to go through rebuilding the whole OS installation? I didn't think that was necessary.
I'd rather not do it, but I do think it's necessary.
One of the two drives on this machine is slow to spin up, which means it probably has a bad bearing. It has a hot-swap backplane that can hold 4 drives but it only has 2 in right now. Drive diagnosics don't report any problems with the drives so I'd have a 50% chance of selecting the right drive to swap out.
I'd rather not gamble and replace both drives with 4 good ones. I'd reconfigure the RAID from a straight mirror of the two drives to a RAID 5 stripe over all 4. This will give us 50-GB of disk space without us having to spend any money since I have a supply of 18-GB drives I've swapped out of some of our servers when I upgraded them to larger units.
Drives for these machines ain't cheap; these are SCSI3 drives with SCA backplane connectors.
I can also use this opportunity to remove the Windows partition Dell sticks on all their servers from the factory to run their mostly-worthless diagnostics.
