On 09/09/98 09:36:36 you wrote:

AFAIK, there's no problem leaving a bad drive sitting in the shelf arbitrarily long, as long as you don't need the drive bay for something else (unless the drive is bad in a way that might affect other drives, like if flames or sparks are coming out of it :-).

One gotcha is that if you leave a bad drive sitting in the shelf, and the system reboots, it could think the drive is a hot spare and allow it to be used again. I don't think this happens in all circumstances (I think there's a way to mark the drive bad such that it won't be used), but it certainly can (and has) happened in the past. So it's generally a good idea to remove the bad drive from the shelf as soon as possible.

Bruce