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Storage : Aggregates : Understanding aggregates : How many hot spares you should have
How many hot spares you should have
Having insufficient spares increases the risk of a disk failure with no available spare, resulting in a degraded RAID group. The number of hot spares you should have depends on the Data ONTAP disk type.
MSATA disks, or disks in a multi-disk carrier, should have four hot spares during steady state operation, and you should never allow the number of MSATA hot spares to dip below two.
For RAID groups composed of SSDs, you should have at least one spare disk.
For all other Data ONTAP disk types, you should have at least one matching or appropriate hot spare available for each kind of disk installed in your storage system. However, having two available hot spares for all disks provides the best protection against disk failure. Having at least two available hot spares provides the following benefits:
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When you have two or more hot spares for a data disk, Data ONTAP can put that disk into the maintenance center if needed.
Data ONTAP uses the maintenance center to test suspect disks and take offline any disk that shows problems.
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Having two hot spares means that when a disk fails, you still have a spare available if another disk fails before you replace the first failed disk.
A single spare disk can serve as a hot spare for multiple RAID groups.

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