Areca ARC-1110, ARC-1130, ARC-1231ML/1261ML/1280ML, ARC-1120 High availability, Global Hot Spares

INTRODUCTION

transparently while the volumes are online, but, at the end of the process, the operating system will detect free space at after the existing volume.

Windows, NetWare and other advanced operating systems sup- port volume expansion, which enables you to incorporate the additional free space within the volume into the operating sys- tem partition. The operating system partition is extended to incorporate the free space so it can be used by the operating system without creating a new operating system partition.

You can use the Diskpart.exe command line utility, included with Windows Server 2003 or the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, to ex- tend an existing partition into free space in the dynamic disk.

Third-party software vendors have created utilities that can be used to repartition disks without data loss. Most of these utilities work offline. Partition Magic is one such utility.

1.4High availability

1.4.1Global Hot Spares

A Global Hot Spare is an unused online available drive, which is ready for replacing the failure disk. The Global Hot Spare is one of the most important features that SATA RAID controllers provide to deliver a high degree of fault-tolerance. A Global Hot Spare

is a spare physical drive that has been marked as a global hot spare and therefore is not a member of any RAID set. If a disk drive used in a volume set fails, then the Global Hot Spare will automatically take its place and he data previously located on the failed drive is reconstructed on the Global Hot Spare.

For this feature to work properly, the global hot spare must have at least the same capacity as the drive it replaces. Global Hot Spares only work with RAID level 1, 1E, 3, 5, or 6 volume set. You can configure up to three global hot spares with ARC-11xx/ 12xx.

The Create Hot Spare option gives you the ability to define a

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