High Availability; Global Hot Spares - Areca ARC-1110 User Manual

INTRODUCTION
transparently while the volumes are online, but, at the end of
the process, the operating system will detect free space at after
the existing volume; the free space will not automatically be
incorporated into the existing operating system partition.
Windows, NetWare and other advanced operating systems sup-
port volume expansion, which enables you to incorporate the
additional free space within the volume into the operating sys-
tem partition. The operating system partition is extended to
incorporate the free space so it can be used by the operating
system without creating a new operating system partition.
You can use the Diskpart.exe command line utility, included with
Windows Server 2003 or the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, to ex-
tend an existing partition into free space in the Dynamic disk.
Third-party software vendors have created utilities that can be
used to repartition disks without data loss. Most of these utilities
work offline. Partition Magic is one such utility.

1.4 High availability

1.4.1 Global Hot Spares

A Global Hot Spare is an unused online available drive, which is
ready for replacing the failure disk. The Global Hot Spares is one
of the most important features that ARC-11xx/12xx RAID adapt-
ers provide to deliver a high degree of fault-tolerance. A global
Hot Spare is a spare physical drive that has been marked as a
global hot spare and therefore is not a member of any Raid set. If
a disk drive used in a RAID Volume Set fails, then the Global Hot
spare will automatically take its place and he data previously lo-
cated on the failed drive is reconstructed on the Global Hot spare.
For this feature to work properly, the global hot spare must have
at least the same capacity as the drive it replaces. Global Hot
spares only work with RAID level 1, 1E, 3, 5, or 6 volume set. You
can configure up to three Global hot spares with ARC-11xx/12xx.
The Create Hot Spare option gives you the ability to define a
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