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Reserved Disk Space during Configuration

Up to 20.6 MB of disk space is reserved when a hard drive is being configured.

Designating Drives as Hot Spares

Hot spares are physical drives that are powered up along with the RAID drives and usually stay in a standby state. The hot spare drive should be larger than or equal to the smallest logical drive. If a hard drive used in a RAID logical drive fails, a hot spare will automatically take its place and the data on the failed drive is reconstructed on the hot spare. Hot spares can be used for RAID levels 1 and 5. Each PERC 3 controller supports up to eight hot spares.

The methods for designating physical drives as hot spares are:

Pressing <F4> while creating arrays in Easy, New or View/Add Configuration mode, or

Using the Objects—>Physical Drive menu.

Press <F4>

When you choose any configuration option, a list of all physical devices connected to the current controller appears. Perform the following steps to designate a drive as a hot spare.

1Press the arrow keys to choose a disk drive that has a READY indicator

2Press <F4> to designate the drive as a hot spare. The indicator will change to HOTSP.

3Save the configuration.

Objects Menu

Perform the following steps to designate a drive as a hot spare.

1Select Objects—>Physical Drive from the Management Menu. A physical drive selection screen displays.

2Select a hard drive and press <Enter> to display the action menu for the drive.

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PERC 3 BIOS Configuration Utility

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Dell 3 Designating Drives as Hot Spares, Reserved Disk Space during Configuration, Using the Objects-Physical Drive menu