Anyone else out there running without hot spares?

Now, no. In the past, yes. We were space hungry and we'd maxed on the number of disks in some of our earlier and smaller NetApps, so we threw the spares into the pool because we kept tipping over the 100% full mark and not being able to write anything and that was bad.

As it turned out, we were okay. The odds of two disks going bad before you get a chance to replace one of them is fairly minimal, especially if you set the thing to send you e-mail notifying you of a bad drive.

Especially if you set the thing to send e-mail to both your mailbox and your pager notifying you of a bad drive.

Amy -- who now has enough co-workers to not have to carry a pager 24x7x365 anymore, but who does it anyway.