Using "spare" disks on a remote FreeNAS box

[dpearcefl]

I will be soon deploying a FreeNAS box with thirty 8 TB drives forming volumes no more than eight wide as ZRAID2. I am contemplating adding a "spare" drive allocated to each volume.

Q1: I can't see in the documentation a statement that the spare drive will be automatically inserted when a drive fails? Is this what happens?

Q2: Considering this is a remote box, far from help, are there any downsides to doing this, other than just the loss of available disk space and additional power?

Q3: It looks like if I leave a drive or two unallocated, I could manually replace a failed drive in any of the volumes. Correct?

 

[Mirfster]

I can't see in the documentation a statement that the spare drive will be automatically inserted when a drive fails? Is this what happens?

http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_intro.html?highlight=spare:

Support for hot spare drive replacement has been added. If you have spare drives in your pool, and a drive fails, FreeNAS® should automatically remove the failed drive from the pool and replace it with the spare

Considering this is a remote box, far from help, are there any downsides to doing this, other than just the loss of available disk space and additional power?

Nope and may be suggested in most cases since it is an "off site" system.

It looks like if I leave a drive or two unallocated, I could manually replace a failed drive in any of the volumes. Correct?

Yep could do that as well.