SOLVED What is the hot spare workflow?

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sethgoldin

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May 9, 2015
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Running 11.1-U6. My pool consists of:
  • Four 11-drive RAID-Z3 vdevs
  • Two striped L2ARC SSDs
  • One hot spare
Last week one drive in one of the vdevs had a self-test log error count increase from 0 to 1, so today I went ahead and offlined it and initiated an RMA for that drive.

However, I had expected the hot spare to somehow automatically rebuild for the offlined drive, but it's still showing as "available."

What is the actual purpose of logically assigning a drive to be a hot spare, if it doesn't just automatically rebuild for the offlined drive? What is the hot spare workflow?
 
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Because the drive was still part of the pool and you (the administrator) offlined the drive the system did not consider that a failure but more a decision. Hot Spares kick in when a disk is removed from the pool by the system not by the administrator. You were correct to replace the drive but you shouldn't expect the hot spare to kick in when you offline a drive.

PS: I don't recommend it however if you had of just pulled the drive the hot-spare would have kicked in.
 
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Jul 3, 2015
Messages
926
Because the drive was still part of the pool and you (the administrator) offlined the drive the system did not consider that a failure but more a decision. Hot Spares kick in when a disk is removed from the pool by the system not by the administrator. You were correct to replace the drive but you shouldn't expect the hot spare to kick in when you offline a drive.

PS: I don't recommend it however if you had of just pulled the drive the hot-spare would have kicked in.

PPS: Hot-spares are nice to have when you are not around always to quickly react to issues like the one you noticed but they are not a replacement for monitoring your system and reacting in the correct way you did.
 
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