Areca ARC-1130 User Manual

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transparently while the volumes are online, but, at the end of 

the process, the operating system will detect free space at after 

the existing volume.

Windows, NetWare and other advanced operating systems sup-

port volume expansion, which enables you to incorporate the 

additional free space within the volume into the operating sys-

tem partition. The operating system partition is extended to 

incorporate the free space so it can be used by the operating 

system without creating a new operating system partition. 

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

Windows Server 2003 or the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, to ex-

tend 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 utilities 

work offline. Partition Magic is one such utility.

A Global Hot Spare is an unused online available drive, which is 

ready for replacing the failure disk. The Global Hot Spare is one 

of the most important features that SATA RAID controllers provide 

to deliver a high degree of fault-tolerance. A Global Hot Spare 

is a spare physical drive that has been marked as a global hot 

spare and therefore is not a member of any RAID set. If a disk 

drive used in a volume set fails, then the Global Hot Spare will 

automatically take its place and he data previously located on the 

failed drive is reconstructed on the Global Hot Spare. 

For this feature to work properly, the global hot spare must have 

at least the same capacity as the drive it replaces. Global Hot 

Spares only work with RAID level 1, 1E, 3, 5, or 6 volume set. 

You can configure up to three global hot spares with ARC-11xx/

12xx.

 

The Create Hot Spare option gives you the ability to define a