At 6 pm yesterday (with 7pm dinner plans), I was demonstrating Remote
Desktop to someone by accessing a win2k3 server from my desktop.  I was
greeted with a message that the server had lost a hard drive.  Checking
further, I discovered that the hardware controller had automatically failed
over to the dedicated spare drive.

Called Dell.  In a 15-minute phone call, the tech had me reboot into the
controller's management software, attempting to verify that the problem was
the drive rather than the backplane.  A new drive arrived at 7:30 this
morning.  After a quick installation process, including designating the new
drive as a hot spare, all is back to normal.

Interestingly, the Dell tech said that most of their customers will not pay
for a hot spare drive.  I'd say the spare was a good investment considering
that this whole incident took a half hour, with no loss of data or
performance, and no effect on the users.  I've been skeptical of some of
Dell's claims about their hardware controllers, but I've got a lot more
confidence now that I've seen this in action.

Best of all, I was planning on most of the day to deal with this problem, so
now I've got some free time for a change.