Hot swaps or cold swap hosts: Does it matter with a Raid system using Mac?

Businesses can lose money if they have to shut down their operations, even for part of a day. But, they lose less than if a company was out of operations for weeks because Apple hard drive recovery or hard disk recovery was needed from a professional. How can businesses salvage a bad situation before it reaches the point Mac hard disk recovery is needed? One way is to use a hot swap host to repair the malfunctioning drive that is connected to your Raid system.

What is a hot swap host? Smaller companies may not have the budget or the manpower to have a dedicated IT team, let alone an IT professional. However, business owners can hire hot swap hosts. These hosts are a third-party vendor who will provide you with another driver that is close to the same configurations, it is patched and updated so very little changes may need to be made. It allows a business to still operate and not shut down any services while changing out a failing drive. It also may reduce the chances of needing Apple hard drive recovery or hard disk recovery.

Should I switch to a cold swap Host?

What is a cold host swap? Smaller companies cannot afford to lose money by being down for weeks while a professional provides Mac hard disk recovery. Though it is similar, how does a cold swap differ from a hot swap? A cold swap is matching a drive for other drivers in Raid. A replacement is simply kept on hand until needed. Why keep a cold spare on hand? A cold spare can help restore Raid to a fault-tolerant state and you can use Raid to rebuild, if changes are made to a Raid system. Having a spare on hand helps move the process along quickly, as it can take days if your vendor do not have a hard drive to cold swap already in hand.

A driver failure means a Raid 5 system reverts back to a Raid 0 state. If two drives go down, a Raid system has completely lost its volume. This is why it is smart to have a cold swap on hand. It minimizes the chances that something will go wrong with a Raid system or a company may lose a whole Raid volume because two or more Raid drivers fail. Ideally mounting a cold swap to a drive carrier, having it already tested and initialised may save time and plenty of headaches.