Nvidia MS-7374 manual Designate a Spare Disk, B-13, About Spare Disks, Free Disk, Dedicated Disk

nVidia RAID

Designate a Spare Disk

About Spare Disks

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 another disk when one of its disks crashes or becomes unusable. The process is automatic and requires no user interaction.

Example: A system may have 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. If one of the mirrored array drives fails, the free disk will be assigned automatically to the mirrored array to replace 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. The dedicated 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.

To mark a disk as dedicated (reserve it for use by a specific array), you must have at least one free disk and you must also have at least two RAID 1, RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 arrays created.

Requirements for Designating a Spare Disk

The Designate Spare option on the Storage page appears only if all the following conditions are met.

•There must be at least two fault tolerant arrays already created.

•There must be at least one free disk with capacity equal to or greater than the smallest disk in the given fault tolerant array.

For example, if a mirror array is created with disk capacities of 40 GB and 80 GB, there should be at least one free disk available of capacity equal to or greater than 40GB to be used as a spare disk for that array.

Instructions

Click Designate spare to start the Designate Spare W izard and then follow instructions.

You can press F1 to access the online help that walks you through the Wizard with step-by-step instructions.

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