On 04/11/2013 06:36 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > I'm setting up this huge RAID 6 box. I've always thought of hot spares, > but I'm reading things that are comparing RAID 5 with a hot spare to RAID > 6, implying that the latter doesn't need one. I *certainly* have enough > drives to spare in this RAID box: 42 of 'em, so two questions: should I we use several of this kind of boxes (but with 45 trays) and our experience was that the optimum volume size was 12 hdds (3 X 12 + 9) which will reduce the 45 disks to a actual size of 37 disks (a 12 disk volume is 40 TB size ... in event of a broken hdd it takes 1 day to recover.. more than 12 disks and i dont (want to) know how long it would take) and we don't use hot spares. HTH, Adrian