A hot spare is a backup device that is usually in standby mode but becomes immediately available if a primary computer component fails, malfunctions or goes offline. It is an operative component and is considered part of the working system. Hot spares can be power supplies, A/V switches, hard disk drives, or network printers. The device is considered to be hot because it is turned on, although it is not continually active in the system.A hot spare may be used for both hardware and software backup.
A hot spare is a fail-over component that offers reliability in system configurations. A fail-over occurs without user involvement and is generally automatic when system failure is detected. It acts like a secondary system that can be switched on if the primary system fails, and is designed to rebuild automatically with little or no interruption. A hot spare is typically a solitary, critical device that a computer could not function without. When there is a problem, the system is altered in order to incorporate the hot spare into its structure. It is intended as a temporary fix and is designed to substantially increase system availability during the exchange process. A hot spare also decreases the mean time of recovery for a device and prevents potential data loss due to disk failure. However, a hot spare does not provide 100% protection against momentary system loss when switching to the backup.
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