First, lets go over some basics. Unless you are a power user with unmatched skill at playing with devices, your software RAID linux solution will not support HotSwap. And most likely your onboard built in SATA controller does not either. That is okay, you can still hot swap drives, you will just have to ‘re-add’ them to your array.
I searched high and low for a tutorial on how to set up a webserver with a raid 1 array and a hot spare, all bootable. No real tutorial is out there and the few that are there are very vague and do not deal with bootable partitions. As far as I know, this is the only tutorial like it online…whoo hooo.
In this section I shall show you:
– How to set up your raid 1 array Mirror and hot spare
– how to add LVM for partitioning
– How to re-add drives to your array after losing them
– Make all drives in your array bootable
– Make sure your bios works for you.
– How to add a blank Drive to your Array to replace a broken one