XRAID-2 Hot Spare or Expansion with FlexRaid

Another data point on the RAID5+spare vs RAID6. With a hot spare, there is generally no regular I/O happening to this drive, even though it is spun up -- I don't believe RAIDiator supports regular background scrubbing. That means that the spare has the possibility of gathering faults just by being present over time, and a rebuild at a crucial moment could render your volume unprotected. With the double parity, you do have some degree of overhead from an extra write, sure, but if you're already going to render that drive as unused space, I suspect the benefit of having it as part of an actively used parity stripe is of more value than just letting it randomly spin and /maybe/ be useful as a spare someday.