Correct. And when (if... knock on wood) one of the drives in the array fails, the hot spare will be switched into the array and the array will be rebuilt, on the fly.
Yes, a hot spare is a disk that is set aside and will be immediately called upon to rebuild a RAID set should one of the drives in that RAID set die. This is opposed to a cold spare which is a hard drive that is not set to automatically be chosen as a rebuild disk. A cold spare is a fancy name for one of those hard drives that you keep in your desk drawer should something bad happen to one of the servers.
The functionality for a hot spare can be implemented in unique ways depending on the RAID controller that you're using, so check up on that. I've heard of RAID controllers not wanting to keep the array on the hot spare after a failure and will rebuild the array when you replace the failed drive. That seems counterintuitive to me since I don't want datasets being rebuilt anymore than necessary.
Have a look at ACNC's easy to follow animated RAID tutorial. When searching for this link to give you, I was slightly annoyed that they didn't address the topic of hotspares. However, it explains many of the other RAID levels... even the rarely heard of RAID 2 and 4.
Correct. And when (if... knock on wood) one of the drives in the array fails, the hot spare will be switched into the array and the array will be rebuilt, on the fly.
Yes, a hot spare is a disk that is set aside and will be immediately called upon to rebuild a RAID set should one of the drives in that RAID set die. This is opposed to a cold spare which is a hard drive that is not set to automatically be chosen as a rebuild disk. A cold spare is a fancy name for one of those hard drives that you keep in your desk drawer should something bad happen to one of the servers.
The functionality for a hot spare can be implemented in unique ways depending on the RAID controller that you're using, so check up on that. I've heard of RAID controllers not wanting to keep the array on the hot spare after a failure and will rebuild the array when you replace the failed drive. That seems counterintuitive to me since I don't want datasets being rebuilt anymore than necessary.
Have a look at ACNC's easy to follow animated RAID tutorial. When searching for this link to give you, I was slightly annoyed that they didn't address the topic of hotspares. However, it explains many of the other RAID levels... even the rarely heard of RAID 2 and 4.