Promise Technology TX4000 user manual Using a Hot Spare Drive, Creating Multiple Disk Arrays

Chapter 3: FastBuild Configuration Utility

Using a Hot Spare Drive

If a third drive is attached and is not assigned to a mirrored two-drive disk array (one optimized for Security), it will be recognized as a spare drive. Such a drive is immediately used as a standby replacement. It is automatically added to an array once a disk member of the array has been detected as failed.

To restore fault tolerance as quickly as possible, FastTrak TX4000 begins to perform an automatic data rebuild on the spare drive in the background without the need to restart the system.

At a later time, the failed drive can be physically removed from the FastTrak TX4000 card and an extra drive added in its place to function as the spare drive.

Important

The hot spare drive must have a capacity that is equal to or larger than the smallest array member.

Creating Multiple Disk Arrays

If you plan to create multiple arrays,

1.Attach only the drives necessary to create the first disk array and complete the Auto Setup (1).

2.Install the additional drives needed for the second array and again use the Auto Setup (1).

Note

If you wish to customize the settings of individual disk arrays (such as block size), you must manually create disk arrays with the Define Array (3) option from the Main Menu.

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