Hot-Spares
As I mentioned earlier, some RAID levels can replace a failed drive with a new drive without user intervention. This functionality, known as hot-spares, is built into every hardware RAID controller and standalone array. It is also part of the Linux kernel. If you have hardware that supports hot-spares, then you can identify some extra disks to act as spares when a drive failure occurs. Once an array experiences a disk failure, and consequently enters into degraded mode, a hot-spare can automatically be introduced into the array. This makes the job of the administrator much easier, because the array immediately resumes normal operation, allowing the administrator to replace failed drives when convenient. In addition, having hot-spares decreases the chance that a second drive will fail and cause data loss.
Warning
Hot-spares can be used only with arrays that support redundancy: mirrors, RAID-4, and RAID-5. Striped and linear mode arrays do not support this feature.
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