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Dell PowerVault ME4 Series Storage System Administrator’s Guide

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Global spares

In the PowerVault Manager, you can designate a maximum of 64 global spares for disk groups that do not use the ADAPT RAID level. If a disk in any fault-tolerant virtual or linear disk group fails, a global spare—which must be the same size or larger and the same type as the failed disk—is automatically used to reconstruct the disk group. This is true of RAID 1, 5, 6, 10 for virtual disk groups and RAID 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50 for linear ones. At least one disk group must exist before you can add a global spare. A spare must have sufficient capacity to replace the smallest disk in an existing disk group.

The disk group will remain in critical status until the parity or mirror data is completely written to the spare, at which time the disk group will return to fault-tolerant status. For RAID-50 linear disk groups, if more than one subgroup becomes critical, reconstruction and use of spares occur in the order subgroups are numbered.

The Change Global Spares panel consists of two sections. The top section contains the disk sets summary and Disks table which presents cumulative data for existing global spares for the disk group as well as for selected disks. The Disks table lists information about the global spares in the disk group, updating as you select disks to add to show the total number of disks selected as global spares and the total size of the global spares.

The bottom section lists the disks located within each enclosure in your system that can be designated as global spares along with their details. Disks that are designated as global spares, as well as disks you select to designate as global spares, are highlighted in blue. Select disks by doing one of the following:
  • Select a range of disks within an enclosure by entering a comma-separated list that contains the enclosure number and disk range in the Enter Range of Disks text box. Use the format enclosure-number.disk-range,enclosure-number.disk-range. For example, to select disks 3-12 in enclosure 1 and 5-23 in enclosure 2, enter 1.3-12,2.5-23.
  • Select all disks by checking the Select All checkbox.
  • Filter the disks in the list per disk type, enclosure ID, slot location, or disk size by entering applicable search criteria in the text box. Clear the filter by selecting the Clear Filters button.
  • Click on individual disks within the table to select them and add them to the disk group.

Remove global spares by clicking on current global spares to deselect them. Viewing pools contains more details about the Disk Information panel.

NOTE:Disk groups support a mix of 512n and 512e disks. For consistent and predictable performance, do not mix disks of different rotational speed or sector size types (512n, 512e). If a global spare has a different sector format than the disks in a disk group, an event will appear when the system chooses the spare after a disk in the disk group fails. For more information about disk groups, see About disk groups.

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