Ok, this is an old post but it answered many of my questions just reading it. I do need to know one more answer that is not listed here.
I have a RADI5 setup that was degraded. I put in a new hot spare drive and used the PERC300 software (CTRL+R) and setup the drive as a global spare successfully.
I then downloaded and installed the Openmanage software which showed to me that it was rebuilding my drive and it was almost done. That was great and it finished successfully,
I restarted and no longer received the 'degraded' message. All has gone well.
My first drive (0) and my 3rd drive (2) are both ONLINE. My 2nd drive (1) is READY and my 4th new drive (3) is SPARE. My initial error message started with 1----RAID5 Degraded Virtual Disk (R/W).
Here is my question: Now that there are 4 drives installed, how do I tell which one was the physically defective one? I would like to remove it from the system but I don't know where to go to identify it.