SOLVED Hot swap and hot spare HDD clarification

[Oko]

Today I replaced one of failed HDD on the storage pool running of TrueOS 10.1 (not exactly FreeNAS). I have two questions and I have seen related past post about the topic but I would like to have clarification.

1. Does FreeNAS (I have two servers running 9.1.5) support hot swap? What do I mean by hot swap?

Today after marking failed HDD off line I shut down the server put the new HDD. Then started it. Did replace drive which was marked off line with the new one. After that the pool was automatically resilvered. The above question really translates into the following. Can I skip shut down step and replace failed HDD while the server is up and running? That is pretty trivial with hardware LSI hardware RAIDs I am accustomed to.

2. Second question is more hypothetical. If I had hot HDD which was not the part of an existing pool is there a way to make that drive hot spare and have FreeNAS automatically replace failed HDD. I do not want to get into philosophical discussions how useful are hot spares. For the record I personally don't use hot spare drives in my Lab.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Hot spare isn't supported

Hot swap should work if hardware supports it

 

[anodos]

I've replaced hard drives in freenas without shutting down. Like mentioned above, hardware needs to support it.

Hot spare = wasted drive + wasted space

 

[cyberjock]

Hot spares aren't always a waste. If your server is going someplace that you don't want to physically be at to replace a drive, a hot spare is what you want to have. Personally, as a home server, I'd never ever ever recommend a hotspare. You're home most of the time. But if your server is in a colo, you might want one or two. ;)