Hot Spare Drives - Maxtor NAS 6000 Administration Manual

MaxAttach NAS 6000 Administration Guide
After the failed drive has been exchanged for a new drive, the administrator must use the
GAM to rebuild the affected array and incorporate the new drive. Once initiated by the
administrator, the rebuild process will proceed in the background with some load on
system performance. A full rebuild of a six disk array takes between five and seven hours.

Hot Spare Drives

Hot Spare Drives (also called Hot Standby Drives) are one or more drives that are not
assigned to any RAID array nor being used as a JBOD disk. These are available in reserve
to take over in case of the failure of any array drive. Controlled by the Mylex RAID
Controller card, a hot spare drive is powered-on but idle during normal array operation. If
a failure occurs on a disk in a fault-tolerant RAID array, the hot spare drive takes over for
the failed drive and the array rebuild process begins as described above.
After completing an automatic rebuild cycle, the array continues to function in a fully
fault-tolerant mode. The rebuild cycle for a six disk RAID 5 array takes between five and
seven hours. After the rebuild cycle completes, the array is returned to full fault tolerance
and normal I/O operations. the array can now safely suffer a second drive failure and
continue to function before any disks are replaced.
Chapter #11 - Appendix - Disk Array RAID Concepts
11/07/01 -- Revision 2.0.03A
Chapter #11 - Appendix - Disk Array RAID Concepts
Maxtor MaxAttach NAS 6000 RAID Operations and the GAM
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