Hot Spare status

When I talk about a "hot spare" I am meaning a disk that I set aside for use as a spare - it is not in the NAS and is not powered. AFAIK there is no way to keep a spare drive plugged into the NAS.

I am actually talking about the hot spare feature that is available only in Flex-raid mode and not in X-raid mode. This spare (hot spare)
drive occupies a slot in your NAS and sits un-utilized until one of the live drives fails.

I want to know if this spare drive is in some kind of sleep mode or is it powered up and spinning like the live data drives.
If it is spinning like a live utilized drive, then it will receive some wear and tear just like the all of the other drives in the array.

If a Jedi would like to chime in, it would be greatly appreciated because I have asked this question about a year ago without anyone
on this forum providing an answer.

Thanks,

Stretchjr

All,

Sorry If I sound harsh or brash...

Believe me...I love all 3 of my Netgear Nases..

I am finally planning to move from X-Raid2 to flex-raid due to my upgrade to the latest X86 Raidiator (Ultra 4 plus).

I just want to know if I will experience wear and tear on the hot spare and also if it will make my NAS use more electricity
while it sits there waiting for a hard drive to fail..

Thanks to all who utilize this forum, especially those that help the most of us rookies..

Regards,

Darryl

stretchjr wrote:
I am actually talking about the hot spare feature that is available only in Flex-raid mode and not in X-raid mode. This spare (hot spare) drive occupies a slot in your NAS and sits un-utilized until one of the live drives fails.

Got it. I don't use flexraid; I had forgotten about that feature.

The main drawback I see to a hot spare on a 4 bay NAS is that you then effectively have the capacity of only two of the drives, with one drive devoted to redundancy and one to the hot spare. I have a spare drive for my NAS, but it is in it's original sealed anti-static bag in a cabinet. With e-mail alerts, and the LED front panel giving warning, it seems to me that there is plenty of warning. That also gives me more on-line capacity on my 4 bay NAS.

I am not sure if the hot spare would help in case of a dual drive failure. If you lost a drive and it was automatically kicked in without you taking action or even knowing about it, and during the resync you lost a second drive would you lose the array? Of course on the six bay models, dual redundancy is offered which would relieve that situation. Of course in any case if all of your data is on a single device you would want to maintain a current and complete backup of all critical/important data.

All,

I am only at just below 40% utilization of my drives, so I am willing to lose one of my slots for a hot spare.

I also would rather that my failed drive get replaced by the hot spare as soon as possible to limit the time that
I am running without redundancy.

So I am still interested in finding out if the hot spare is spinning when the others are active.

I would prefer that the hot spare stay in sleep mode thus conserving electricity and wear and tear on the hot spare drive.

Thanks,

Stretchjr

While I have no definitive answer, I would think not. If the drive were idle and not spinning, the OS could not keep track of it. I would think that it is all or nothing, either all spun down or all spun up.

However, since you have an Ultra, there is another thread where they determined that when spun down, only two are actually spun down and two stay active. This is due to the PSU limitation. When booting the drives are spun up one at a time, but when waking from the sleep (spun-down) mode, the PSU does not have enough power to spin all four simultaneously.

PapaBear wrote:
While I have no definitive answer, I would think not. If the drive were idle and not spinning, the OS could not keep track of it. I would think that it is all or nothing, either all spun down or all spun up...

I have no definitive answer either, but my guess would be the opposite of yours. The slot is configured to hold a hot spare, there really is no need for the OS to continuously "keep track of it". There could of course be a periodic spin-up to check the SMART stats, but it seems to me that keeping a hot spare spun up 24x7 would be a bad idea.

I have been able to find a definitive answer for you.

"A hot spare disk remains in standby mode and automatically replaces data from a failed disk from the volume. If your volume is configured as RAID 1 or RAID 5, and your system at least one disk more than the minimum for that RAID level installed, you can specify one disk to function as a hot spare." Page 21 software manual.

So it does not stay fully active while waiting to be used and will have less ware than the active drives.

Just the news I wanted to hear....

I will post my results when i set it up...

Thanks again to all of you..I really appreciate the team work....


Regards,

Stretchjr