6.2 Hot Spare Limitations

  • Hot spares protect redundant logical drives only. To protect non-redundant logical drives, set the spare activation mode of the controller to predictive activation.
  • You cannot create a hot spare from a disk drive that is already part of an array.
  • You should select a disk drive that is at least as big as the smallest disk drive in the array that it might replace.
  • You must designate a SAS hot spare drive for an array comprised of SAS disk drives, and a SATA hot spare drive for an array comprised of SATA disk drives.
  • You can designate a SMR HA1 or SMR DM drive for all hot spare types. A SMR drive cannot protect a PMR2 drive, or vice-versa.
  • Changing spare type for Shared Dedicated Spare Drive from physical device is not possible. The Array level Spare Management option must be used to change the Spare Type from Dedicated to Auto-Replace when the Dedicated Spare is protecting multiple arrays. By changing the spare type from Dedicated to Auto-Replace, the shared Dedicated Spare gets unassigned, and it does not protect the selected array anymore. The user must assign the ready drives as an Auto-Replace spare to protect the selected array.
1 SMR: Shingled Magnetic Recording. HA: Host Aware (backward compatible with standard HDD). DM: Device Managed (backward compatible with standard HDD).
2 PMR: Perpendicular Magnetic Recording; standard HDD recording technology.