Online volume expansion, High availability, Global/local hot spares – Areca 24/4 Internal/External Port Pcie 3.0 12 Gb/s SAS/SATA Raid Controller 2Gb Cache User Manual

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APPENDIX

of disk failure(s). In the case of disk failure, the volume set

transitions from migrating state to (migrating+degraded)

state. When the migration is completed, the volume set tran-

sitions to degraded mode. If a global hot spare is present,

then it further transitions to rebuilding state.

Online Volume Expansion

Performing a volume expansion on the controller is the pro-

cess of growing only the size of the latest volume. A more

flexible option is for the array to concatenate an additional

drive into the RAID set and then expand the volumes on the

fly. This happens transparently while the volumes are online,

but, at the end of the process, the operating system will de-

tect free space at after the existing volume.

Windows, NetWare and other advanced operating systems

support volume expansion, which enables you to incorporate

the additional free space within the volume into the operat-

ing system partition. The operating system partition is extend-

ed to incorporate the free space so it can be used by the oper-

ating system without creating a new operating system parti-

tion.

You can use the Diskpart.exe command line utility, included

with Windows Server 2003 or the Windows 2000 Resource Kit,

to extend an existing partition into free space in the dynamic

disk.

Third-party software vendors have created utilities that can be

used to repartition disks without data loss. Most of these utili-

ties work offline. Partition Magic is one such utility.

High availability

Global/Local Hot Spares

A hot spare is an unused online available drive, which is ready

for replacing the failure disk. The hot spare is one of the most

important features that RAID controllers provide to deliver a

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