Hot Spares

A hot spare is an extra, unused disk drive that is part of the disk subsystem. It is usually in standby mode, ready for service if a drive fails. Hot spares permit you to replace failed drives without system shutdown or user intervention.

MegaRAID implements automatic and transparent rebuilds using hot spare drives, providing a high degree of fault tolerance and zero downtime. MegaRAID RAID Management software allows you to specify physical drives as hot spares. When a hot spare is needed, the MegaRAID controller assigns the hot spare that has a capacity closest to and at least as great as that of the failed drive to take the place of the failed drive.

Important

Hot spares are employed only in arrays with redundancy, for

example, RAID levels 1, 3, 5, 10, 30, and 50.

A hot spare connected to a specific MegaRAID controller can only be used to rebuild a drive that is connected to the same controller.

Chapter 2 Introduction to RAID

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