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SANtricity 11.5
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What is a hot spare drive?

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Hot spares act as standby drives in RAID 1, RAID 5, or RAID 6 volume groups. They are fully functional drives that contain no data. If a drive fails in the volume group, the controller automatically reconstructs data from the failed drive to a hot spare.

If a drive fails in the storage array, the hot spare drive is automatically substituted for the failed drive without requiring a physical swap. If the hot spare drive is available when a drive fails, the controller uses redundancy data to reconstruct the data from the failed drive to the hot spare drive.

A hot spare drive is not dedicated to a specific volume group. Instead, you can use a hot spare drive for any failed drive in the storage array with the same capacity or smaller capacity. A hot spare drive must be of the same media type (HDD or SSD) as the drives that it is protecting.

Note

Hot spare drives are not supported with pools. Instead of hot spare drives, pools use the preservation capacity within each drive that comprises the pool.