ZFS - hot spares : automatic or not?

[Dan Langille]

On 1/4/2011 11:52 AM, John Hawkes-Reed wrote:
> On 04/01/2011 03:08, Dan Langille wrote:
>> Hello folks,
>>
>> I'm trying to discover if ZFS under FreeBSD will automatically pull in a
>> hot spare if one is required.
>>
>> This raised the issue back in March 2010, and refers to a PR opened in
>> May 2009
>>
>> * http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-March/007943.html
>> * http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=134491
>>
>> In turn, the PR refers to this March 2010 post referring to using devd
>> to accomplish this task.
>>
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-March/055686.html
>>
>> Does the above represent the the current state?
>>
>> I ask because I just ordered two more HDD to use as spares. Whether they
>> sit on the shelf or in the box is open to discussion.
>
> As far as our testing could discover, it's not automatic.
>
> I wrote some Ugly Perl that's called by devd when it spots a drive-fail
> event, which seemed to DTRT when simulating a failure by pulling a drive.

Without such a script, what is the value in creating hot spares?

-- 
Dan Langille - http://langille.org/