What is a hot spare drive

I did not quite understand what you said about hot spares & DSM version 7: I am still at DSM 6.2.2. Would it be OK to use a SHR configuration 3 out of the 44 drives and a hot spare with this version? Is it beginning to be the trend now to use hot spares? Thanks.

Sorry for all these questions but I just want to make sure a good redundancy is there and once I finish setting it up, I won’t badger you with questions after the initial stage. The Synology help and knowledge base as well as Youtube do not explain it very well. Your video (as well as other videos) do. Maybe it is because English is my 3rd language.

Hot spare has been a popular choice for a long time. But it needs a extra bay with a spare drive to sit and do nothing (not part of the RAID) until one of the drives in the RAID fails. Once it happens, the broken drive is disconnected and virtually replaced by this spare drive which was sitting and doing nothing for a year or more. If drive in the RAID fails at 1AM in the morning, no one will notice until next day. Then getting a new drive would take couple of days. And then a day or more to rebuild a RAID using a new drive. During this time another drive can fail. And this would mean losing all your data if you selected only one drive redundancy.
Synology was promising in new DSM7 update to make this whole thing of spare drive even smarter. Instead of waiting for a drive to fail, Synology would predict the drive failure before it actually happen. This potentially damaged drive would be automatically replaced by a spare drive without a need to rebuild your RAID.

I hope this helps.

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