Creating Hot Spare Drives

Hot spares are drives that are available to automatically replace failed drives in a RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, RAID 50, or RAID 60 virtual drive. Dedicated hot spares can be used to replace failed drives in a selected drive group only. Global hot spares are available to any virtual drive on a specific controller.

To create a dedicated or global hot spare drive, follow these steps:

1.	Select the Physical tab in the left panel of the MegaRAID Storage Manager main menu, and click the icon of an unused drive.

For each drive, the window displays the port number, enclosure number, slot number, drive state, drive capacity, and drive manufacturer.

2.	Either select Go To > Physical Drive > Assign Global Hot Spare, or select Go To > Physical Drive > Assign Dedicated Hot Spare.

3.	Perform one of these actions:

If you selected Assign Dedicated Hotspare, select a drive group from the list that appears. The hot spare is dedicated to the drive group that you select.

NOTE  If the controller supports High Availability DAS, dedicated hot spares can be assigned to only one drive group. If you try to assign dedicated hot spares to more than one drive group, an error message appears.

If you selected Assign Global Hotspare, skip this step, and go to the next step. The hot spare is available to any virtual drive on a specific controller.

4.	Click Go to create the hot spare.

The drive state for the drive changes to dedicated or global hot spare, depending on your selection.