Galaxy Metal Gear 65 manual Managing Dedicated Spares, Adding a Dedicated Spare

Galaxy 65 User Guide

E.1 Managing Dedicated Spares

Dedicated spares are unused disk drives that you assign as a spare to a specific array. The disk must be as large as the smallest member of the array. You cannot use a dedicated spare drive as a member of an array or as a pool spare.

Although using a dedicated spare is the most secure way to provide spares for your arrays, it is also expensive to keep an idle drive assigned to each array. An alternative method is to assign one or more idle drives to the spare pool. See E.3, ”Managing the Spare Pool”, on page 170.

E.1.1 Adding a Dedicated Spare

You assign dedicated spare drives to a specific array. If a member drive in the array fails, the Galaxy 65 Subsystem uses a dedicated spare drive to automatically reconstruct the array. You can add dedicated spare drives to mirrored (RAID 1 and RAID 10) and parity (RAID 3, RAID 4, RAID 5, and RAID 50) arrays when you create the array or afterward. You can assign up to four dedicated spare drives to an array. For more information about assigning spares when you create an array, see C.1, ”Creating Arrays”, on page 105.

Note You cannot add a spare that does not have enough capacity to replace the smallest member in the array.

To add a dedicated spare:

1From the System Menu, select Array Menu and press Enter. The Select Array screen displays with a list of existing arrays.

2Select the array you want and press Enter. The array menu displays.

3Select Add Spare and press Enter T

The list of drives screen displays listing the available drives.

Note If a drive was a member of an array and was removed from the array, you cannot use it as a spare until you clear the drive’s metadata. For more information, see F.1.2, ”Clearing Metadata from a Drive”, on page 177.

To toggle the display between the drive model number, serial number, and the node and WWN, press T.

4Select the drive you want to add as a spare and press Enter. The system confirms the change.

5Select Yes and press Enter.

E.1.2 Deleting a Dedicated Spare

You can delete a dedicated spare drive from an array at any time.

To delete a dedicated spare:

1From the System Menu, select Array Menu and press Enter. The Select Array screen displays with a list of existing arrays.

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