Hot Spares And Rebuild; Global Hot Spares - Dell PowerVault MD3220 Owner's Manual

5 To assign hot spares, in the Hot Spare Coverage window, select a disk
group in the Hot spare coverage area.
6 Review the information about the hot spare coverage in the Details area.
7 Click Assign.
The Assign Hot Spare window is displayed.
8 Select the relevant Physical disks in the Unassigned physical disks area, as
hot spares for the selected disk and click OK.
9 To unassign hot spares, in the Hot Spare Coverage window, select physical
disks in the Hot spare physical disks area.
10 Review the information about the hot spare coverage in the Details area.
11 Click Unassign.
A message prompts you to confirm the operation.
12 Type yes and click OK.

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 MD3200 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.
Configuration: Disk Groups and Virtual Disks
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