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.