Hi All,

I've recently retired my Isis 5500 and am breaking it down for spares. The PSU failed which prompted this so I was not able to erase the raid set while it was still up and running.

What's the best option for erasing the single drives in order to safely sell on as spares - by what means and with what kind of formatting? I presume it will have to be a certain type in order to be recognised and adopted into the raid set when added? I also understand the specific drives in these units have Avid firmware inlcuded - I presume erasing the drives won't removethis firmware?

Not that I plan to but just out of interest, I presume they could still be reformatted and used as regular HDDs?

Many thanks in advance for any advice you might be able to offer!

They are regular HDD just with Avid custom firmware for identification. You can use them as spare or your next computer boot drive. 

The best way to clean them is using Windows DiskPart and the "clean" command. It might still be detected as foreign config on another Isis. You can safely tell Isis to ignore it. 

Great, thanks so much for your help Dom, much appreciated!

Just one further follow-up. Do you happen to know if the 4TB HDDs taken from my Isis 5500 would be compatible for use in a Nexis?

Many thanks again!

I never tried it. Technically it should work unless the Avid custom firmware also identifies product compatibility and not just Avid branding. However, if I remember correctly, ISIS 5500 drives use a SATA connection and Nexis uses SAS.