Sign up ×  In a different question about configuring a RAID
array, the author is building a RAID array with 8 drives.  One
answer suggests using 7 drives in RAID 5 with one left over as a
hot spare. Since RAID 6 protects against two failures, even if
they are concurrent, I assumed it would always be a better
choice.  When would you use a hot spare instead of an extra
parity drive?  share|improve this question The correct answer
here of course is that you should use RAID6 with a hot spare (or
maybe even 2) –  Mark Henderson Nov 23 '11 at 20:41  7 Answers 7
up vote 5 down vote accepted  The only good reason for having a
hot spare in my opinion is if you have several RAID-5/6 arrays
and want to share the spare between them. Otherwise, it is a
waste.  Many will justify use of RAID-5 + spare vs RAID-6 by
performance reasons, but this performance difference is
THEORETICAL. From my experience the REAL performance difference
between RAID-6 and RAID-5 is negligible or non-existent. I'm
talking about hardware RAID wit