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CompTIA Security+ 3.4
TechKnowSurge Catalog Interactives Can the Spare Save It?
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Can the Spare Save It?

A drive fails and a spare is ready. Can the spare rebuild it? Land five in a row.

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

About this interactive

A spare disk is an extra disk on the machine. When a drive dies, the server writes that drive's information back onto the spare and puts the array back together on its own. It can only write back what still exists. In RAID 1 it copies the surviving disk. In RAID 5 and 6 it recreates the lost drive from the data and parity on the others. A spare is not redundancy by itself. On a disk with no RAID, or in RAID 0, the lost blocks exist nowhere else, so there is nothing to put on the spare. The same is true when more drives fail than the level can lose. A machine can hold several spares, each declared to take over any disk that fails.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.

Key terms

Spare Disk
An extra disk installed in a system that automatically replaces a failed drive and rebuilds data to restore a RAID configuration.
RAID 0
A RAID configuration that stripes data across two or more drives to improve read and write performance, but provides no fault tolerance — losing any one drive loses all data.
RAID 1
A RAID configuration that mirrors identical data simultaneously across two drives, providing full redundancy so that the array continues operating if either drive fails.
RAID 5
A RAID configuration that stripes data and distributed parity across three or more drives, providing read performance gains and the ability to survive the failure of any single drive.
RAID 6
A RAID configuration that stripes data across four or more drives with two independent sets of parity, allowing the array to survive the simultaneous failure of any two drives.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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