Hot-swapping Discs

Hi Guys,
I am new on this forum and still learning how things work in here.
I wanted to ask a question regarding disc swapping. We want to set up 3 machines, all with identical hardware and the only difference will be their network cards, also we might have more CPUs in some machines than others. We want to set up a spare disc (identical to those in the machines) that we can swap with any disc that fails. The question is: would this work? What about the difference in CPUs wouldn’t that cause problems if the disc was setup using a machine that has less CPUs than the one that we are putting it in?
Thanks

 

Swapping hard discs

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the reply,
I did not mean to ho-swap them as I knew that would be impossible. I meant to do it when the machine is off.
I thought that the network cardswould need drivers reloaded as well. I think I did not explain the situation quite well, let me give you a scenario: what we want is having 2 systems, one being a spare one. each system will have 2 mirrored discs. so if the machine fails for some reasons, we would like to take the discs out and put them in the spare machine so that we can be back online within a few minutes. we would then fix the failed machine and put back the discs once fixed. if the live machine has 3 CPUs for ex and the spare one has 2, when we swap the discs wouldn't that cause any problems?
Thanks

 

I think a decent hardware RAID system would do what you want. It could even be truly hot swappable if partnered with the right equipment.

RAID is a system that spreads data over multiple disks. A Google search for RAID will give you plenty of references for more information. So basically your data would be spead across the disks. If you use RAID 5 (3 or more disks) or RAID 1 (2 disks {or sets of disk} only), the system will continue to work even when a disk fails. You can then replace the failed disk with any disk of the same size or larger (and of the same format as the original {SATA or SCSI for example}). server cases often come with special back planes, that allow you to replace the hard drive without shutting the system down.

In general hardware RAID (RAID provided by a dedicated RAID card - sometimes incorporated into the motherboard) is more reliable and flexible than software RAID, and I would recommend investing in RAID controller cards. PCI SATA RAID cards are about the same price as a hard disk. For examples have a look at the Adaptec site.

A decent RAID card will rebuild the failed disk as soon as it detects (or is told) that a replacement is installed. They also allow you to install spare hard disks before a failure. In this case, as soon as a disk failure is detected the RAID card firmware will prepare the spare and bring it on line automatically.

Hardware RAID is independant of CPU and operating system so it should not matter that you have different CPU in the computers