Is it safe to remove and and insert disk from raid server while turned off?

Question

I have raid 10 with 22 disks in a server. I would like to remove each disk to get his serial number and just insert it again the same order, is it safe to do it while the server is turned off?

thank you

Answer 1

While in theory (and most of the time in practice too) you can do it, I'd recommend you to not to do it if purpose is ONLY to get the serial number of drive.

I presume that this is hardware raid managed by some hardware raid controller and in that case, most of the controllers have some sort of accompanying management utility that can be used to retrieve all the information about the disks managed by the controller.

Here's the example of how to use the utility for one of the popular RAID controller, LSI. I hope you can find similar utility for your RAID controller and use it effectively.

Answer 2

Yes, this will be safe. Depending on your hardware, operating system and available utilities it may be possible to get this information from the running system too.

Answer 3

Yes, this should be no problem if you remove the disks while the server is turned off. Just put every disk back in the same bay and power on afterwards. But you should get this information also when the server is on without removing anything, for example with SNMP.