1.4.4 High availability
1.4.4.1 Creating Hot Spares
A hot spare drive is an unused online available drive, which is ready for
re- placing the failure disk drive. In a RAID level 1, 0+1, 3, 5 or 6 raid set,
any unused online available drive installed but not belonging to a raid set
can define as a hot spare drive. Hot spares permit you to replace failed
drives without powering down the system. When RAID subsystem detects a
UDMA drive failure, the system will automatic and transparent rebuilds
using hot spare drives. The raid set will be reconfigured and rebuilt in the
background, while the RAID subsystem continues to handle system request.
During the automatic rebuild process, system activity will continue as normal,
however, the system performance and fault tolerance will be affected.
Important:
The hot spare must have at least the same or more capacity as the
drive it is replacing.
1.4.4.2 Hot-Swap Disk Drive Support
The RAID subsystem has built the protection circuit to support the replacement
of UDMA hard disk drives without having to shut down or reboot the system.
The removable hard drive tray can deliver “hot swappable,” fault-tolerant RAID
solutions at prices much less than the cost of conventional SCSI hard disk
RAID subsystems. We provide this feature for subsystems to provide the
advanced fault tolerant RAID protection and “online” drive replacement.
