I have a situation where I need to replace one of the shelves in an F740 and I want to make sure that what I am planning to do will work ok. I am replacing the shelf because it has some kind of strange fault that causes the second power supply to immediately fail upon power up. I called it in to tech support and after trying a couple of things they ended up shipping me a replacement shelf. Unfortunately, the shelf has already been brought online because the initial failure appeared to be simply a bad power supply and I knew I would get a replacement within a day or so.

The machine in question is heavily used and the project does not want me to take the machine down for any longer than is required. What I thought I would do is to shut down the machine and move all of the drives from the bad shelf to open slots on the other shelves (none of the shelves are full yet). I can then remove the bad shelf from the cabinet and install the replacement shelf, this time being careful to do a power up test before connecting the shelf to the filer. Once the new shelf is physically installed in the cabinet I can then shut down the filer, move the drives back to the new shelf, and reboot again.

My understanding of the way the filer works tells me that this plan will work but I just wanted to get some feedback before attempting it. The alternative would be to shut down the filer and keep it down for an extended period while the bad shelf is removed and the new shelf is installed but obviously that would involve more down time and I am trying to avoid down time.