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Remove the 3.5-inch rear drive cage

Use this information to remove the 3.5-inch 2-bay or 4-bay rear drive cage.

About this task

Attention

  • Read Installation Guidelines to ensure that you work safely.

  • Power off the server and disconnect all power cords for this task.

  • Prevent exposure to static electricity, which might lead to system halt and loss of data, by keeping static-sensitive components in their static-protective packages until installation, and handling these devices with an electrostatic-discharge wrist strap or other grounding system.

  • Before you remove or make changes to drives, drive controllers (including controllers that are integrated on the system board), drive backplanes or drive cables, back up all important data that is stored on drives.

  • Before you remove any component of a RAID array (drive, RAID card, etc.), back up all RAID configuration information.

  • If one or more NVMe solid-state drives are to be removed, it is recommended to disable them beforehand via the operating system.

Procedure

  1. Prepare your server.
    1. Remove the top cover. See Remove the top cover.
    2. Disconnect the cables from the rear drive backplane.
    3. Remove all the installed drives and fillers (if any) from the drive bays. See Remove a hot-swap drive.
  2. Remove the rear drive cage.
    Figure 1. Removing the 2 x 3.5-inch rear drive cage
    Removing the 2 x 3.5-inch rear drive cage

    Figure 2. Removing the 4 x 3.5-inch rear drive cage
    Removing the 4 x 3.5-inch rear drive cage

    1. Twist and pull out the blue plungers.
    2. Slide the drive cage towards the rear of the chassis to release it.

After you finish

Remove the backplane from the drive cage. See Remove the 3.5-inch drive rear backplane.

Demo video

Watch the procedure on YouTube