Promise Technology 150TX2 user manual Using a Hot Spare Drive

Chapter 2: Getting Started

Using a Hot Spare Drive

Caution

With some models of hard drives, if the Master hard drive fails, it may cause the Slave hard drive to be unrecognized by the computer's operating system. Where a RAID 1 (Mirroring) array exists on the Master/Slave pair, this condition may cause the operating system to freeze.

Do NOT create a RAID 1 (Mirroring) array with two Parallel ATA hard drives using the Master/Slave arrangement on Channel 3 (the Parallel ATA port).

You can create a RAID 1 (Mirroring) array by combining hard drives on:

•Channels 1 and 2 (Serial ATA only)

•Channels 1 and 3 (one Serial, one Parallel)

•Channels 2 and 3 (one Serial, one Parallel)

If a third drive is attached and is not assigned to a mirrored two-drive disk array (one optimized for Security), it will be recognized as a spare drive. Such a drive is immediately used as a standby replacement. It is automatically added to an array once a disk member of the array has been detected as failed.

To restore fault tolerance as quickly as possible, FastTrak S150 TX2plus begins to perform an automatic data rebuild on the spare drive in the background without the need to restart the system.

At a later time, the failed drive can be physically removed from the FastTrak S150 TX2plus card and an extra drive added in its place to function as the spare drive.

Important

The hot spare drive must have a capacity that is equal to or larger than the smallest array member.

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