Protecting Your Data with Hot Spares

A hot spare is a disk drive or SSD (Solid State Drive) that automatically replaces a failed drive in a logical device and can subsequently be used to rebuild that logical device.

A hot spare can be global or assigned ("dedicated").

A global hot spare is not assigned to a specific logical device. It protects any logical device (except RAID 0). You can create a global hot spare either before or after you build your logical devices; you can also create a hot spare while you’re creating a logical device.

A dedicated hot spare is an assigned hot spare—it is used only to rebuild the logical devices to which it is assigned. A dedicated hot spare that has been assigned to protect more than one logical device is called a pool spare.