As explained in a previous topic, it is possible to assign free drives as hot spares so that when one drive fails, one of the hot spare drive can be used automatically for rebuilding the data.
This feature is pre-enabled on every DDP60EXR models shipped before October 2016. These units hence come with 4 hot spare drives as factory default.
Under certain circumstances, it is required to first check the RAID status prior to rebuilding the data.
Therefore, all our customers using DDP60EXRs or other DDP models with hot spares will have, out of precaution, to disable the hot spare mechanism and also to update the EX RAID cards firmware to the latest version.
That way, the system status can be first checked by a DDP engineer before manually triggering the data rebuild by assigning one drive as a hot spare.
This can be done by logging into the Areca web interface and then going to the “Delete hot spare” entry under the “RAID Set Functions”:
A list of all configured hot spares will appear. Select all hot spares from the list and delete them one by one.
The drives will now be marked as free, preventing them to be used automatically by the RAID card for rebuilding the data after a drive failure.
That way, the system status can be first checked by a DDP engineer before manually triggering the data rebuild by assigning one drive as a hot spare.
This extra security step do not require any downtime and the rebuild will happen transparently, letting all the clients work on the DDP without any interruption.
For customers who use RAID 6, these steps are not necessary.