Nvidia 4 Setting Up a Spare RAID Disk

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CHAPTER 3
Using the NVIDIA MediaShield RAID Management Utility
Setting Up a Spare RAID Disk
You can designate a hard drive to be used as a spare drive for a RAID 1, RAID 0+1 or
RAID 5 array2. The spare drive can take over for a failed disk. MediaShield RAID
supports two types of spare drives:
•Free Disk
A free disk is a disk that is not part of any RAID array, but can be used by any available
RAID 1, RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 array that requires a particular disk when one of its disks
crashes or becomes unusable. The process is automatic and doesn’t require any user
interaction.
For example, if you have a system with four hard disks where one disk is used to boot
the OS, two hard drives are set up in a mirrored array, and a fourth hard disk is set up
as a free disk, then if one of the mirrored array drives fails, the free disk will be
automatically assigned to the mirrored array to be used instead of the failed disk.
• Dedicated Disk
A dedicated free disk is a disk that is assigned to a RAID 1, RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 array
and that disk is used by that array only when needed, for example during a system
crash where a RAID mirrored drive is broken. The dedicated disk can be used only by
the array that it is assigned to and not by any other array, unlike a free disk which can
be used by any available RAID 1, RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 array.
Note: You must have at least two RAID arrays to use this feature.
2. Spare disks cannot be used for RAID0 or JBOD arrays.