Netserver Rack Storage\12

[Brendan Mullen]

I have a Netserver RackStorage\12 with room for only 1 more drive. I am trying to choose between adding one more drive that would be available for storage or adding that same drive as a Hot Spare.

If I add a drive as a Hot Spare and sometime in the future one of the drives in the array goes bad - does the array still have to go through the long process of rebuilding or does the presence of the Hot Spare eliminate this process.

I badly need to add more space but if the presence of a Hot Spare eliminates the long Rebuild process then I would probably opt for that.

If the rebuild process is the same I would just keep an extra drive at hand and plug it in if needed.

[Marino Meloni_1]

you are right, the long process always occur, the only vantage is that with a hot spare, you don't need to manualy swapp the hdd to start the rebuild and to make againt the raid redundant, this operation is automatic, butthe time is the same because the hot swapp disk is free until it is need.
bye
marino

[Joseph Durnya · Accepted solution]

the only drawback is that if you have more than one hard drive failure your array will fail if you dont have the hot spare

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Brendan:

I would be very reluctant to disable active hot spare. It narrows the vulnerability window for a 2nd drive failure. If a drive fails overnight or over a weekend the rebuild can proceed automatically. It also leaves more room available for RAID 1/0. I should also point out that if you are running an AutoRAID this close to capacity you are killing its performance. One option to consider is too purchase an additional 12H on the used market; they are very cheap now.

Clay