Hot Spares And Rebuild; Global Hot Spares; Hot Spare Operation - Dell POWERVAULT MD3600F Owner's Manual

Hot Spares and Rebuild

A valuable strategy to protect data is to assign available physical disks in the
storage array as hot spares. A hot spare adds another level of fault tolerance to
the storage array.
A hot spare is an idle, powered-on, stand-by physical disk ready for immediate
use in case of disk failure. If a hot spare is defined in an enclosure in which a
redundant virtual disk experiences a physical disk failure, a rebuild of the
degraded virtual disk is automatically initiated by the RAID controller
modules. If no hot spares are defined, the rebuild process is initiated by the
RAID controller modules when a replacement physical disk is inserted into
the storage array.

Global Hot Spares

The MD3600f Series supports global hot spares. A global hot spare can
replace a failed physical disk in any virtual disk with a redundant RAID level
as long as the capacity of the hot spare is equal to or larger than the size of the
configured capacity on the physical disk it replaces, including its metadata.

Hot Spare Operation

When a physical disk fails, the virtual disk automatically rebuilds using an
available hot spare. When a replacement physical disk is installed, data from
the hot spare is copied back to the replacement physical disk. This function is
called copy back. By default, the RAID controller module automatically
configures the number and type of hot spares based on the number and
capacity of the physical disks in your system.
A hot spare may have the following states:
• Standby hot spare—is a physical disk that is assigned as a hot spare and is
available to take over for any failed physical disk.
• In-use hot spare—is a physical disk that is assigned as a hot spare and is
currently replacing a failed physical disk.
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Configuration: Disk Groups and Virtual Disks